CHIVALRIC IDEOLOGY ENJOYED a remarkably long and influential life in early European history. Throughout the High and Later Middle Ages and for an uncertain run of years into the Early Modern era, chivalry formed the framework for thought and action among the nonclerical elite. Since many who merely hoped some day to join the elite—or who were actively taking on its coloration as fully as possible—likewise looked to chivalry as the guide to life and conduct, chivalric ideology may safely be considered the lay esprit de corps, the body of ideas by which laymen evaluated conduct, shaped thought, and launched aspiration.1 Alternative frames of reference had not been much in evidence.
Yet nearly all scholars would insist that, somewhere in the borderlands between “late medieval” and “early modern,” vigorous medieval chivalry died, or at least underwent radical transfiguration. Were it possible to draw up the required certificate, what words would we enter for cause of death? Justifiably, we might consider simple natural expiration in old age unlikely for so vigorous a body of ideas, and we may likewise rule out mere quiet euthanasia to relieve an aged sufferer. Prudently, we may leave the issue of the justifiability of alleged homicide to other inquests.
Like the reliable Captain Renault (as played memorably by Claude Raines) in the classic film Casablanca, we might first round up the usual suspects. The resulting lineup will obviously include some of the great motive forces of the age: (1) changing military professionalism, technology, and tactics; and the bureaucratic support of war (often considered a “military revolution,” sometimes specifically narrowed to a “gunpowder revolution”); (2) the new learning represented by humanism as a challenge to a chivalric lay esprit de corps; (3) radical religious reform undercutting spiritually efficacious atonement secured through meritorious corporal suffering; and (4) growing state power.
If the list seems long, it shortens quickly. Could the technology associated with gunpowder simply blast the practice of chivalry—and its ideology—out of existence? Close investigations suggest that early gunpowder weapons were neither accurate enough, nor sufficiently lethal at long enough distances (especially against decent armor), to effect a revolution by themselves.2 Was the force of a set of broader tactical and sociocultural changes (size of armies, infantry tactics, new fortifications), so sudden and sweeping that they—rather than sulfurous blasts of black powder—killed the chivalric ethos by rendering the men who practiced it superfluous? In the view of many scholars it has become increasingly hard to rank such agencies as prime suspects.3 Granted, debate has been highly productive as well as contentious and continuous for more than a decade.4 But however informative this body of scholarship on warfare and society in various periods, it has not produced any agreement as to timing and pace of change. With estimates of time of death varying over centuries (carrying into the seventeenth or even eighteenth centuries in some instances) and with precise agents still in doubt, this cluster of suspects can be exonerated as primary cause.5
Humanism and the Fate of Chivalry: Erasmus and More
Could new ways of thought powerfully at work in society prove sufficiently destructive of chivalry to warrant an entry on its formal death certificate? If chivalry functioned, as this book has argued, as the pattern for elite lay society, might not radically new ideas about the formation and nature of the elite ranks mount a disabling challenge?6 Such questions draw our attention first to humanistic thought as a hallmark of the era. We will then turn to a second set of potentially challenging ideas, radical notions of religious reform.
Some of the most famous practitioners of humanism could champion an anti-heroic, anti-war, and anti-chivalric stance. How severely humanist scholarship could target the heroic ideal embodied in chivalry appears in the early sixteenth century in works of two leading Christian humanists active in England, Erasmus (who visited regularly at this time) and Thomas More. Though Henry VIII was acclaimed as an ideal ruler by many humanists, Erasmus and More expressed horror at the vigorous war policy the king embraced early in his reign.7 Henry liked to be styled the Tenth Worthy (completing the medieval set of nine) and founded royal armories at Greenwich to provide plate for the “marcyall ffayts” that were his delight.8 His humanist critics never endorsed pure pacifism (an anachronistic concept for the time), and showed the prudent indirection required whenever criticizing such a monarch; yet Erasmus and More vigorously attacked the chivalric ideal that animated his early foreign policy. Though his father had exercised frugal caution and had maintained a French alliance, Henry patterned himself instead on the warrior king Henry V and sought a great continental victory to shine alongside his medieval predecessor's triumph on the field of Agincourt.9 With fantasies of showy victory in mind, the young Henry reportedly asserted
that it behooved him to enter upon his first military experience in so important and difficult a war in order that he might…create such a fine opinion about his valour among all men that they would clearly understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors.10
To this end he assembled an army more than three times the size of the one Henry V had led in his earlier invasion of France. In this new force (or its adjuncts at sea or on the Scottish border) served thirty-six of the forty-two temporal peers of the realm or their representatives, contributing more than a third of Henry's army from their own retainers.11 Royal policy had obviously gained aristocratic support.
Closely informed about the invasion, Erasmus lamented that behind the pomp, the blare of trumpets, and the blasts of guns there was “wholesale butchery, the cruel fate of the killers and the killed.”12 His Christian peace-making, though not pacifism, was based on the Beatitudes, interpreted in a direction quite unlike that in the manuscript illustration with which this book began.13 “A tragedy like that,” Erasmus lamented, “contains such a mass of woes that a human heart can hardly bear to describe it.”14 His own heart had been wounded by news that Alexander Stewart, a dear friend and former pupil, had been killed at the recent battle of Flodden. To this lamented friend he rhetorically posed the question, “Tell me, what had you to do with Mars, the stupidest of the poets' gods, you who were consecrated to the Muses, even to Christ?”15 Constant human warfare has always meant brother killing brother, father killing son, he believed, even when all are Christians. “O blindness of the human mind! No one is astonished, no one horrified.” Custom determines all: “So true it is that nothing is too wicked or too cruel to win approval, if it has the sanction of custom.” He charges that the customary practices of the heroic stance, of chivalry, have distorted the gospel. Young men rush to war inflamed by exemplars held up for them by flatterers and the foolish (including theologians); only slowly do they learn “to the suffering of the whole world, that war is a thing to be avoided by every possible means.”16 Erasmus even denounced the classical font of heroic literature: “Our Illiad contains nothing, indeed, but the heated folly of stupid kings and peoples.”17 Erasmus had opened his earlier treatise, Enchiridion, written to a practicing soldier, with the passage from Job that headed the Harley manuscript illumination examined at the start of this book: “militia est vita hominis super terram” (the life of man on earth is warfare—or struggle, or a form of chivalry). But his book interprets this maxim in a purely spiritual sense; undercutting structural timbers of the chivalric ethos, he repeatedly denigrates mere physical capacity to overwhelm opponents, blasts hollow worldly honor, and warns against the insatiable appetite for vengeance that makes the injurer worse than the injured.18 To those contemporary Christians who found justification for warfare in accounts of divinely sanctioned conquest in the Hebrew Scriptures he wryly commented that yet these same people eat pork.19
Thomas More enthusiastically joined the attack on the heroic muse. Though his first target presented less challenge to his pen than the great Greek classic Erasmus had denounced, he did satirically deflate a contemporary poem written in high epic style about a slain French naval leader.20 Yet more potently, in his discussion of military affairs (de re militari) in Utopia, he advocates a strictly pragmatic and clearly non-heroic approach to warfare. His Utopians regard war with loathing “as an activity fit only for beasts.”21 Contrary to the view of most people, “they count nothing so inglorious as glory sought in war.”22 His telling inversion of chivalric values continues with a claim that the best victory is won not by prowess but “by stratagem and cunning,” for even animals can win by brute force.23 Avoiding danger is more important than gaining fame.24 Best of all is to sow dissention among the enemy, assassinate their leaders, or encourage their unfriendly neighbors into action so as to win without fighting at all. Picked troops of Utopian youth must be readied to kill or capture enemy leaders on the field, if it comes to a fight, but rough mercenaries (by which More evidently means the Swiss) should do as much of the fighting as possible. Utopians do not ravage enemy territory, sack captured cities, or indeed take any booty at all. Even if it is inevitable, war should simply be fought efficiently and won quickly, without grand thoughts of honor. Such ideals stand much of chivalric thought on its head.25
The issues, of course, remain how widely the circle of ideas spread, how influential they proved to be, and how representative they were. As a frontal assault on a warrior ethos, the results can only register as failure. Had the critical point of view of these humane humanists won a flood of converts in high places, chivalric attitudes (and all their progeny)—the very antithesis of their views—might have been hurried at least a few significant paces toward the ash-heap of history.26 Of course this did not happen. Erasmus believed that original sin worked through inherited social customs, and we have already noted his sad recognition that custom justifies even the wicked and the cruel. Whether or not the heroic ideal in its chivalric guise embodied wicked and cruel components, it could scarcely be dislodged from a central place in the thinking of leaders of the early sixteenth century by the honed critiques of humanists meditating on uncompromising gospel truths.
It seems likewise undeniable that the great figures of Erasmus and More did not represent the broad body of humanist thought. Other scholars easily came to see God's work progressing through actions of their particular godly prince; praising ideal governance in their lifetimes, they kept one eye on the ancient Roman imperium and its ideally dutiful soldiery.27 The will of the powerful would safely continue to exercise its inherent rights; violence proudly performed by the elite was still gilded and sanctified by an ethos with roots far beyond any critic's uprooting grasp.
Humanist scholarship, in short, spoke with no unified voice on tangled issues of war, violence, and peace. Its techniques and sources could carry a writer toward more than one goal; its eloquent style and prestigious sources could serve more than one master. In this sense, humanism brought a method, an approach to learning, more than a set body of ideas. If certain currents of ideas were dangerous to a chivalric ethos, the thought and writing of other humanists could be highly supportive. So much in the corpus of ideas revived from antiquity could readily be coopted to adorn and buttress surviving elements of the chivalric code. There had always been, in fact, a strong courtly component within chivalry itself which provided open portals to the new ideas.28 Sensitive and spiritual men such as Erasmus, More, and Colet agonized over the atrocities and sinful wastes of war; other writers drew on fashionable classical learning as they unstintingly lauded heroic deeds of bold warriors in their own age or any other. The path was cleared by a belief that warriors of the ancient world they so vastly admired were practicing ideal chivalry and were, in fact, its founders. Writers steeped in the classical view that the all-important quality of manly virtue (Latin virtus, Italian virtu) was a military attribute would have little difficulty in drawing on antique authors when writing about chivalry in their own time. In the fifteenth century, the Burgundian court especially acted as a fountainhead for disseminating such ideas. Striking evidence of humanistic praise for chivalric ideals persisting into the sixteenth century will be examined shortly (when we consider two adoring biographies of model French knights). More generally, the political and religious context shaping the entire later medieval and early modern era easily muffled voices severely questioning warfare and the need for martial heroism. It was truly difficult for religious critiques of war in the abstract to win hearts and minds in an age characterized by decisive religious conflict. Given crusades by Teutonic knights, Hussite wars in Bohemia, and eventually the invading Turkish armies reaching the gates of Vienna, justifications of heroic fighting were not hard to invent.29 Such pressing problems ensured that a wide range of humanist opinion existed. This variety of ideas was significant. It enabled—for a brief time, at least—a successful continuance of an old technique: selective chivalric appropriation of current ideas.30 The heroic ethos lived on, and warriors did not want for enthusiastic and learned supporters who could pen praise in the most up-to-date style.
Yet the relevant issue was so often authority rather than war itself. War could scarcely be dislodged from its invisible throne. Humanists sang the praises of martial glory even more than they reflected the glowing ideals of the Sermon on the Mount; but the authority to lead and regulate war at every level remained crucial. Their sources, no less than their patrons, inclined many humanist scholars to highly favorable views of authority that could promote a perceived public good. Ciceronian ideas of public well-being could be integrated with stress on great deeds of individual prowess.31 In short, the new learning could strongly reinforce an older tradition of a public authority in whose service heroes fought.
Practitioners of the new learning could thus scarcely end the robust life of chivalric ideology. Yet they could undoubtedly play a highly important role as accomplices to that deed. Beloved classical sources gave scholars a new respect and potent new valorization for the idea of respublica as the common good or common weal that trumps individual honor. Medieval writers, rulers, and administrators had been no strangers to the idea of the common good; their statutes and proclamations extolled the communitas regni; and kings and their assemblies, estates, parlements, and parliaments self-consciously enacted new laws pro bono publico.32 Yet the new emphasis on the common weal is significant. If the sociocultural context for chivalric ideas had always shown a highly individualistic coloration, the new emphasis reinforced emerging ideas on citizenship.
The broad trend seems to move toward elevating and instructing an elite corps of citizen-governors. This is famously the goal of Sir Thomas Elyot's Book Named the Governor, fulsomely dedicated to Henry VIII in 1531. The work was obviously popular, as its frequent reprinting shows. The volumes are filled with descriptions of classical virtues to be absorbed and vices to be eschewed by those who would help the much-admired sovereign govern what Elyot terms the public weal.33 His self-designation as a knight on the title page is the only time that potent word appears in the entire work.34 In the long run, this emphasis on citizenship would tell.
New patterns of education slowly created a climate of elite opinion that focused on the sovereign at the apex of a hierarchical commonwealth of citizens. Heroic ideas had to absorb new valorizations. Though humanist writing caused no sudden death, gradually and powerfully it helped bring chivalric ideology to its end by the support given to growing state power.
Radical Religious Reform and Chivalric Ideology
Changes in religious ideas—another potential agent in the demise of chivalric ideas—likewise need to be seen within a generous chronological framework. To borrow the apt phrase of David Potter, we should think of “a long-term organic regenerative movement within the church.”35 Perhaps scholars too long shared with inquisitors and magistrates from centuries they study a liking for labels, wanting to know if some individual or group in the early years of this reform movement was truly heretical or orthodox, “Lollard,” eventually “Protestant,” “Lutheran,” or “Calvinist.”36 The impression has grown upon historians that many late medieval or early modern folk themselves would have been less sure about the analytical usefulness of these labels, particularly in an age when labels might serve merely pejorative ends or indeed might bring intended criminal liabilities. Ideas attractive to these folk might not clearly categorize them in boxes left from old inquiries. Pondering personal piety and church reform could lead to a great variety of conclusions.
Did changing currents of religious thought affect ideas of chivalry in the shadow-land between Medieval and Early Modern? We have seen that a well-documented past connected knightly piety and valorization with religious debate and (at least on their own terms) had allied them with waves of reforming energy within the Church.37 Even more powerfully, reform tides gathered force once again. In simplest terms, the question becomes how a knightly ethos still very much alive in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe would negotiate its way through this new terrain. Could the process by which chivalric ideology flourished continue in this brave new world? Could apologists for chivalry continue to appropriate religious ideas in active contention?
An unusually perceptive clerical observer in the early sixteenth century might have feared that radical, even shattering, religious reform was acceptable to those who held chivalric ideals. Might it not connect with their dangerous tendency to independence? Along important lines the knightly ideology had long moved in directions that, however pious, did not always reinforce clerical authority or lead to Rome. Was not the Protestant reform in effect a lay revolt against the highly clericalized church produced since the Gregorian Reform of nearly half a millennium earlier? If the sixteenth-century reform brought the revanche of the laity against the clerical caste, as is sometimes claimed, might not chivalry align itself with the new expression of lay autonomy? As the esprit de corps of the lay elite, chivalry had significantly staked out its own domain, at times standing against the high claims of the clerical caste so self-consciously elevated by the Gregorian Reform and so stoutly asserted and elaborated thereafter.
Yet our hypothetical observer's worst fears obviously did not materialize. Protecting its own prerogatives, knightly ideology came to terms with the religious world it found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Whatever individual consciences might dictate, the body of knighthood in any region came to accept the religion—and the religious blessing—that was on offer, though the process sometimes required time and bloodshed. An elite, chivalric ideology accepted either reformed or traditional religion and survived the late medieval turmoil and even the shattering of religious unity. The military elite, in short, retained religious valorization; knighthood remained the stout champion of piety, whether it was reformed or traditional.
Yet they could not work the old magic of drawing strength from opposing sides in theological debate, incorporating only what was wanted. Religious disputes now became fundamental as never before. In the High and Later Middle Ages, disagreements over religious ideas affecting knighthood, while given serious thought, could scarcely have threatened unity in the church. Rather they marked debates that emerged as the medieval church produced such unity as it achieved.38 A maturing knightly ideology had readily borrowed any element from debates in which all voices were granted orthodoxy, even as individual writers expressed strong preferences.
Debates at the end of the Middle Ages opened gaps between opponents that proved to be unbridgeable. Book burnings, image smashing, bulls of solemn excommunication, graphic woodcuts showing the pope as Anti-christ or the Roman Church as the Whore of Babylon—let alone the bitter and open warfare that soon broke out—did not open broad avenues for compromise or opportunities for selective knightly appropriation. Religious formulations may always at their core retain an individual character, but throughout the period in question institutional religion remained communal or regional.
Like all others in society, knights finally had to choose a side, or perhaps had rather to accept the side chosen for them. For no governing power could be indifferent to the valorizing force of religion. Good governance had long fused with true belief and practice, whatever the quarrels of kings or great lords with popes and bishops. Lay authority that had been building effective power throughout the High and Late Middle Ages now strode assertively into the center of the debate, claiming the sovereign's God-given power to protect true religion. Cuius regio, eius religio was the principle that triumphed—the one who reigns determines the religion.39 It was a principle to roll Gregorian reformers in their ancient graves.
What is more, the knights themselves—and not merely our imagined clerical observer at the close of the Middle Ages—might have found much to generate caution in the new and radical ideas of religious reform. Some of these reform notions, had they been seriously carried into life, could indeed have had a devastating effect on essential elements of chivalry. We can plainly see the dangers posed by reform in a treatise written by a late fourteenth-century English knight, Sir John Clanvowe. His little book The Two Ways appeared more than a century and a quarter before Luther's 1520 treatise On Christian Liberty.40 Its importance rests not in its broad historical force, which in fact was quickly dissipated, but in its witness to the potential gap between new religious ideas and a chivalric ideology by then centuries old.41 Clanvowe's starkly reformist and puritanical stance marks a great distance from more traditional modes of thought found in Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny a generation earlier. Warning the faithful to avoid the “brood wey,” that broad and worldly way of sin that leads to destruction, Clanvowe urges readers to follow instead the “nargh wey,” the narrow and otherworldly path that will guide them to salvation. Simplistic though the formulation sounds, it completely inverts chivalric ideology—in effect standing a writer like Malory on his head—and severs the link to traditional religion forged over centuries. As Clanvowe asserts,
To God all virtue is worship and all sin is shame. And in this world it is ever the reverse, for the world holds worshipful great warriors and fighters who destroy and win and lay waste many lands and gives much reward to those that have plenty and who spend outrageously in meat and drink, in clothing and building and living in ease, sloth and many other sins. And also the world worships them much that would proudly and spitefully be avenged for every wrong that is said or done to them. And of such folk men make books and songs and read and sing of them in order to hold the memory of their deeds the longer here upon earth, for that is a thing that worldly men desire greatly that their name might last long after them here upon earth.42
Clanvowe assures his readers that God as sovereign judge of truth sees matters differently. In the presence of God and all the company of heaven,
all sin is shame and non-worship. And also such folk that would like to live meekly in this world and avoid such aforesaid riot, noise, and strife and live simply, and eat and drink reasonably and clothe themselves meekly, and suffer patiently wrongs that other folk do and say to them and hold themselves satisfied with little of the goods of this world, and desire no great name or nor reward of this world, such folk the world scorns.
The world considers them “lolleris and looslis,” foolish and shameful wretches. But God considers them to be very wise and worshipful.43
Not only does God prefer such unworldly—we might say non-chivalric—men, Christ gave mortals the great example; far from being a strenuous knight, he lived by values that required him with charitable patience to suffer scorn from worldly men:
And all that he suffered patiently. And Saint Paul says that Christ suffered for us leaving us an example that we should do so following in his footsteps. And therefore we follow his steps and suffer patiently the scorns of the world as he did, and then he will give us grace to come in by the narrow way to the worshipful bliss in which he reigns.44
The message is shocking in the context of late fourteenth-century chivalric society. Displays of prowess—long touted as the essence of chivalry—lead not to imperishable honor but to unthinkable wrongs against a multitude of victims. Chivalric pride and display reinforcing crucial status wither in the face of the demand for utter simplicity and humility. If he makes no explicit attack on traditional religion, Clanvowe simply sidesteps the established and basic notion of an economy of salvation with so much penance neutralizing punishment for so much sin; he likewise ignores the mediation of the priesthood and even traditional reliance on the intercession of saints or the powerful aid of the Blessed Virgin. How he could hold to these views and this pattern of life and yet consider himself a member of the ordo of knighthood remains unclear. It would seem impossible. Chivalry as practiced by William Marshal, Henry of Lancaster, Geoffroi de Charny, and Thomas Malory cannot be contained or even understood within the covers of The Two Ways. Knighthood assuredly did not take the “nargh wey.”
Most notably, Sir John conceives of Christ's suffering in terms of the worldly taunts and jeers hurled at one who refused to live by the false standards of society. Christ's true disciples must follow his “traces” and suffer for their own unconventional beliefs and lives. The imitatio Christi here is not corporally ascetic, not mimetic physical pain and anguish as parallels to the lash, the nails, and the cross, but the very different discipline of ignoring withering scorn and abuse from a conformist world smugly sure of all its standards, its hierarchy, and those who exercise dominance based on violence. So interior a view of the essentials of life with so little regard for great deeds performed heroically, edged weaponry in hand, is no code of chivalry. If the life of Christ is the ultimate heroic, nonviolent life, then the imitatio Christi is not the practice of chivalry.45
Yet Clanvowe's name will never appear on the death certificate of chivalry. That his radical ideas on reform could not realize their potential consequences in the world might simply seem self-evident. Implementing them would require the crumbling of social hierarchy in general, and within chivalric ideology would tear apart the connective tissue, destroy the carefully calibrated compromises, and break bridges between paradoxical borrowings from differing sets of religious ideas. The historical record on the fate of Lollard heresy in the upper reaches of society in England confirms this initial sense.
Lollard Knights
Scholars of late fourteenth-century England have long kept under surveillance “a prominent group of earnest, secular, intellectual knights who were interested in literature and religion.”46 Their interest in literature linked some of them to Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, and Eustace Deschamps.47 Their interest in religious reform brought them under suspicion of heresy. They were contemporaries (though not direct followers) of John Wyclif, whose increasingly heretical ideas had found a home in at least one university and had traveled into city and countryside by means of books and preaching.48 Heresy was in the air and, as Chaucer's Harry Bailey snorted, one might “smell a loller in the wind.” Since K. B. McFarlane began the modern investigation, these famous “Lollard knights” (Sir John Clanvowe prominent among them) have stood at one epicenter of debates swirling around the native English heresy of Lollardy itself.49 In the eyes of some scholars Lollardy ranks as the Reformation that almost was, but that failed by attempting radical change prematurely; to other scholars it is only a sideshow with no significant connection to the break in the church that finally happened, since the English Reformation was caused by political necessity rather than religious ferment.50 Fitting the particular cluster of knights into the broader picture has, not surprisingly, proved difficult.
If the detailed beliefs of these knights elude us among the wisps of our evidence, exact labels may, once again, be less important than a general phenomenon. Most scholars agree that we are not confronted with a sect in the sixteenth-century sense of that word. Even a much more loosely uniform body of opinion and belief may be lacking.51 Yet here are knights with a base in the royal household of Richard II allowed a fairly open range of experimental views on religious belief and reform. There may well, in fact, have been more of their sort than appear in the chroniclers' lists of suspects. McFarlane spoke of these pious knights as the insular form of the Devotio Moderna and as “not so much a distinct sect as a group of extremists,” who reveal a broader (if less intense) trend in fourteenth-century religion.52 The inward-turning piety and somewhat puritanical morality widespread among the elite could easily move sensitive souls in this direction. In fact, some of the qualities associated with Lollards, especially a species of Puritanism that led to a denigration of the mere body and a well-developed sense of personal unworthiness, were evident in the writing of Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny a generation earlier.53 As Jeremy Catto has argued,
It is probable that sympathy for the ideals of the Lollards was spread among the nobility much more widely than their small clique of courtiers, and merged with their responses to the serious call to inner devotion and self-knowledge made by Richard Rolle and the other mystical writers of the age.54
Radical reformers in England seem to have pinned their hopes to pious leadership drawn from the lay elite and especially the commons in parliament, counting on them to launch a movement for reformation of the church. It proved to be a fatal mistake on several levels. Their very program, in the first place, though it contained material as well as spiritual enticements for the lay elite, also included elements that were absolutely incompatible with chivalric ideals. Urging disendowment of the church could always gain lay attention, that is, even among those lords and gentry largely deaf to spiritual formulations; but the pacifism that we saw in the treatise by Sir John Clanvowe would scarcely win over an elite with a highly military self-conception.55 In the Twelve Conclusions posted at Westminster Hall during the meeting of Parliament in 1395 (and possibly on the doors of St. Paul's, where convocation was meeting), the tenth statement thoroughly denounced warfare and even crusading as incompatible with the Christian life:
Manslaughter by battle or pretended law of righteousness for temporal or spiritual cause without special revelation [from God] is expressly contrary to the New Testament, which is a law of grace and full of mercy. This conclusion is openly proved by the example of Christ's preaching here in earth, which mainly taught love and to have mercy on his enemies, and not to slay them. The reason is that when most men fight, charity is lost after the first stroke, and whoever dies outside of charity takes the highway to hell. Furthermore we know well that no cleric can show by scripture or reason lawful punishment of death for one deadly sin and not for another. But the law of mercy that is the New Testament forbade all manslaughter: “in the gospel it is said of old, you shall not kill (in evangelio dictum est antiques, Non occides).”
The corollary is equally radical: it is completely robbery of the poor when lords purchase indulgences “from pain and guilt”
for those that serve in their hosts [for war] brought together to slay Christians in distant lands to win worldly goods, as we have seen. And knights that travel to heathen lands to earn a name in slaying men win much displeasure with the King of Peace; for our belief was advanced by meekness and sufferance and Jesus Christ hates and threatens fighters and man slayers. “He who lives by the sword, shall perish by the sword.”56
Unfortunately for the reformers, their clarion calls did not easily shake a conviction that knighthood rightly fulfilled a necessary martial role within traditional society. As one writer (who may have been Thomas Hoccleve) charged,
Hit is unkindly [unnatural] for a knight
That schuld a kynges castel kepe
To babble the Bibel day and night
In resting time when he shuld slepe.57
Two significant historical events stood like brick walls to block the path that hopeful reformers envisioned for England. In 1381 the Great Rising sent shock waves through the propertied elite of England, jittery since the disquieting news of the brutal French Jacquerie had reached them several decades earlier. Since authorities tend to stand or fall together, the rising of 1381 caused nervous officials of church and state and the landholding elite in general to worry over connections between radical Wycliffite ideas about religious reform and dreaded social unrest. All doubt was removed when hope for radical religious reform led to outright treason in the next generation.58 One of the “Lollard knights,” Sir John Oldcastle, who had become Lord Cobham, diverted Lollard hopes from gradual persuasion through parliamentary reform into outright revolt. He had loyally served the future Henry V as a vigorous knight on campaign and enjoyed his friendship within the princely and then the royal household. Yet his open espousal of Lollard ideas and his hopes of radical religious reform—especially separating the clerics from the wealth that corrupted them—brought charges of heresy. He had apparently counted on effecting reform through his royal friend, but the new king saw himself as a defender of orthodoxy; once Oldcastle had been examined and condemned by the archbishop and bishops, royal friendship gained him only a grace period of forty days before he should suffer the terrifying death inflicted on an obdurate heretic. During that period of royal grace, Henry urged him to recant—at least in a formal sense—to defuse a crisis. Instead, he managed to escape from imprisonment in the Tower. Within a few months he planned to capture the king and tried to launch an armed rising. When, early in 1414, his active supporters gathered outside London, crown spies had given ample warning. The attempted coup generated only half-hearted support, failed miserably, and brought disastrous consequences for all hopes of radical reform. Heresy and sedition now were not only fused, they stood darkly shaded in evident failure. As J. A. F. Pollard dryly stated, the elite discovered they “were King's men first and religious radicals second.”59 The English church did not have to worry about disendowment for the next century. For perhaps as long a time, those who ordered their lives by the ideology of chivalry confronted no worries that their actions offended God as some radicals had implied. The real winner in the suppression of Oldcastle's revolt was, of course, the crown, which had preserved order, suppressed heresy, and proved how essential its role was in maintaining each goal.60
Martin Luther
Martin Luther may never have heard of Lollards or Sir John Clanvowe, though he surely would have found ideas of a plain, God-fearing life based on biblical principles highly attractive. Likewise, Luther probably spent little time thinking specifically about chivalry, though he could urge Christians to struggle as valiantly as knights against evil.61 But he had assuredly heard of John Hus (a name his opponents would not let him forget) and at least through that Bohemian link had some connection with the reforming ideas proposed by John Wyclif a good century and a half earlier.62 To members of the German elite, the very name of Hus brought fearsome associations of heresy backed by the armed force of rebellion, of both political and religious independence.63
Luther's enemies pressed him to recognize his relationship to Hus; his own experiences forced him to confront sin and forgiveness; hard realities of the political world in his lifetime brought the question of licit force to the fore. In his early religious life he undoubtedly obsessed over performance of good works and fearfully practiced harsh physical penance. The trend among learned theologians, however, pointed toward interiorizing the process of reconciling God and humanity. In time, Protestant reformers, as the astute historian of theology Berndt Hamm has emphasized, finally reduced the declining physical element to nothing.64 Since forgiveness for sin had been totally achieved by the sacrifice of Christ, human effort was not necessary. Solus Christus, sola gratia, became the reform principle—salvation came from Christ alone, given simply through divine grace. Old ideas yielded grudgingly in practice, however, and Luther moved slowly toward denial of sacramental status to penance; he sometimes circled back to insist on its importance.65
The point may seem abstruse to modern non-theologians, but dramatic consequences could result from the trend to de-emphasize physical penance and especially from the Reformers' sharp closure eventually given to that trend. If personal asceticism ceased to be a means of atonement and was no longer considered spiritually meritorious, it was not the proper imitation of Christ, not the personal sharing of his bodily suffering as it had been enacted in hope and dread by believers for centuries. The venerable scales weighing good and evil deeds in an exacting economy of salvation—vividly and repeatedly pictured in miracle stories—were now broken and discarded as useless.
If this line of thought carried heavy consequences for European cultural history in general, its potentially shattering effect on chivalric ideology has gone almost unrecognized.66 The religious underpinning of knighthood depended on the performance of specific and highly physical good works, on heroic, meritorious suffering. Warrior heroism had firmly bonded with traditional ascetic and transactional religion. If radical religious reformers' ideas were fully accepted, knighthood lost a major valorizing prop to its very reason for being.
As it appeared in print and sermon, Luther's early schema for a reformed religion indeed threatened to undercut chivalric ideology, however far this may have been from his conscious intent. In his treatise Christian Liberty of 1520, Luther classically outlined his argument for justification of sinners by faith alone, rather than by their own redeeming works. He accepts that “fastings, watchings, labors, and other reasonable discipline” might help to subject the recalcitrant body to the spirit,67 but insisted that all such works are a consequence, not a means, of salvation: “though you were nothing but good works from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, you would still not be righteous.”68 Adam and Eve's labor in the Garden was carried out simply to please God; it was not religiously meritorious labor considered a species of suffering to be credited to their account in the economy of salvation. True Christians give themselves to their neighbor's good as Christ gave himself to them.69 Being a “little Christ” to others in gratitude for divine sacrifice is the commendable form of imitatio Christi, dramatically different from the chivalric understanding of following Christ as a warrior, as we have repeatedly encountered it.
Considering the influence of his ideas in the sixteenth-century world, Luther might seem to have clearer right than Clanvowe or Oldcastle to inscribe his name on the death certificate of chivalry. Yet the plain historical fact is that he soon had to come to terms with the nobles and the effective power of arms-bearers in a world filled with danger. It is difficult to imagine how he might have done otherwise. The necessity was especially clear after his dramatic appearance before the imperial Diet at Worms when his rescue from determined enemies depended upon powerful laymen in armor. It became yet clearer as his ideas of a purely religious liberty helped to spark peasant war, as rebels violently pursued a much more social and economic goal of liberty than Luther's theology intended. The force of the nobles was needed to restore social order, and Luther blessed them as they completed the harsh and bloody task. His younger colleague and intellectual successor in Germany, Philip Melanchthon, is often identified with strong desires to maintain social order against rising fears of anarchy and with an equal impulse to provide intellectual and religious stability insured by a properly authoritative and rigorously trained pastorate.70 In the religious warfare that embroiled Europe for decades, the reformers could not afford the luxury of questioning the heroic forces that preserved them.
Heroic Asceticism, Religious Atonement, and State Power
We can be thankful that scholars have abandoned a simplistic picture of the sudden emergence of the European state in the sixteenth or even seventeenth century, sweeping away the feudalism that had provided the sole organizing schema for benighted medieval people. State-building was a real process in the Middle Ages, with significant results solidly documented in massive archival deposits and classic analytical works.71 In Western Europe, medieval states had begun to emerge by the twelfth century and, of course, some could claim even earlier roots in Carolingian institutions; an off-shore version in Anglo-Saxon England showed special vigor.72 Medieval achievement in turn provided a foundation on which later efforts would build. Although nascent states struggled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the drain and devastation of war, with demographic and economic crises, and with acute problems of public order, they survived and bequeathed durable ideas and structures. Sixteenth-century achievements scarcely represent creation ex nihilo, but rather a significant new phase of growth in a process of long standing.
In sixteenth-century Europe a conjuncture of socioeconomic conditions, new educational and religious ideas, and remarkable political actors amplified the directive power of monarchs and their administrations. Since chivalry had always balanced cooperation and tension in its relationship with the overarching power of kingship, any significant increase in royal power would necessarily affect the vitality of ideals by which knights lived.
Capsule career biographies of two early sixteenth-century knights can provide a sense of the changing relationship between chivalry and the state—or at least the sovereign as agent of the common good. Substantial accounts of both men were written in the homeland of chivalry in the early sixteenth century. Louis, Seigneur de la Tremouille, and Pierre Terrail, known as le Chevalier Bayard, are idealized by their humanistic biographers; their accounts thus provide fascinating insights into the ideal warrior in this age. In both cases, the hero is viewed in relationship to the power of kings.73
Life of Louis La Tremouille
Jean Bouchet, an intimate member of the household of his subject, La Tremouille, published a “Panegyric du chevalier sans reproche, ou memoires de la tremouille” in 1527, two years after Louis La Tremouille met his death in battle.74 Its opening pages recall many a chivalric romance: In the manner of a Lancelot, La Tremouille has, we learn, a body finely formed for knightly action, and like any hero of romance, he is drawn from early years to vigorous, martial activities.75 A new dimension, however, also appears almost at once: the king summons Louis for service at the royal court when he is only twelve years old, precipitating a series of dramatic scenes in the family.76 Though his father argues for delaying a year, the lad is pictured delivering a lengthy and mature speech which makes a case for going at once to the king's side. At its core he asserts that “the royal court is the school of all respectability, where one encounters the good men who instruct in living the civilized life and the means of acquiring not only worldly wealth but imperishable treasures of honor.”77 Both Louis's father and mother voice their fears of the king's anti-Burgundian inclinations. The determined young Louis is not convinced. When he starts off for the king's court without their permission, he is swiftly brought home and lectured on the troubled state of the realm, his own tender age, and the dangerous falseness of court life. While Louis debates with his parents, citing among much else the early age at which Alexander the Great began his conquests, a missive from the king closes the family discussion. Louis is to appear at court at the end of his thirteenth year.78
It is love rather than honor that first touches him there, and he is entangled for a time in a complex triangle involving a friend and that man's wife. But after twenty interesting pages, with “the woman forgotten (la dame oubliée),” he returns to the serious business of succeeding at court by seeking from the king a return of family lands.79 Significantly, it is the king (by now the young Charles VIII) who later chooses a wife for him.80 Above all, La Tremouille launches the military career in the service of the king that will become the focus of his life as recorded by Bouchet. The account proceeds as much by battlefield speeches as by detailed narratives of combat.81
When he is twenty-seven years old, the first of many commands is bestowed, and La Tremouille becomes lieutenant general of the forces of Charles VIII for war in Brittany. The appointment comes, we learn, “from his boldness, prudence, hard work, and good conduct, and from many fine deeds of arms done by him in encounters and sallies performed at the siege of Nantes as well as sieges and attacks on many towns, castles, and fortified places in Brittany.”82 He accepts the assignment “tres-voluntiers” and sets to work “for the profit of the king and realm and to gain honor in this assignment.”83 The combination of royal service and the acquisition of honor will provide the leitmotif of Bouchet's story, and it will be strongly intermixed with religious valorization that his hero gained in such good service. These themes emerge unmistakably as French armies sweep through the Alps passes to conduct the Wars of Italy.
Even before the scene shifts dramatically south of the Alps, however, a speech to his troops by La Tremouille on a Breton battlefield sounds the message of loyal service to the crown and scepter of France; such service will be the cure for civil war, unnatural rebellion, injustice, and loss of nobility. Victory means service to king and country, glory and praise for all; defeat means destruction of country, homes, families, and wives, with endless shame covering all.84 Rather than live in shame they must be ready to die in a good fight and in a just war, serving the king, who is significantly termed the foundation of honor.85
If this message is advanced repeatedly, it registers most powerfully and bonds with religious valorization most fully in the terrible aftermath of Louis's loss of his only son in battle.86 Fighting against the Swiss at Marignan, this young son, the prince of Thalemont, is carried from the battlefield having suffered sixty-two wounds. He could have no hope of recovery. Yet, as Jean Bouchet presents his deathbed scene, if the prince regrets dying in the flower of youth (lacking even time to do full penance for his sins), he sees God's grace in being allowed to die “in service to the king and public weal.”87 Confessed and given last rites, he dies thirty-six hours after receiving his terrible wounds. The king in person informed La Tremouille of his son's death. Louis's response to the king is elaborated as a model for the reader. Showing only the few tears he could not restrain by a stern spirit, the father responded that his sorrow was moderated by knowing that his son had departed “on a bed of honor, having died in your company at your service and in a just war,” though he grants that it does seem against nature to leave a father without his son, rather than the reverse, and to lose a young man “just as he was beginning to acquire honor and the king's good will.”88 Yet he rejoices that after all those wounds—and he repeats that they were suffered in maintaining the public good and in a just war—there was time for confession and last rites. And La Tremouille assures the king of his continued support on campaign while his own life lasts.
With minor variations, this theme is emphasized by being replayed as the sad news is given to the mother of the dead prince, and then to his widow. A bishop informs the widow, assuring her that the prince is now praised in the glorious world beyond, having died “the most virtuous death possible to any prince or lord; on a bed of honor in a justifiable battle in a licit war, not fleeing, but fighting and suffering sixty-two wounds in the royal company and service, admired by all the fighting men and in the grace of God, well-confessed and a good Christian.”89 Wishing to console her further, he assured her that the deadly multiple wounds came from honorable lance-thrusts, not from cannon shot.90 Without these grisly details, La Tremouille's announcement to his wife by letter made the same large points about sacrifice to God, about prowess and service to the crown in licit warfare.91 Both women became ill and soon died after receiving the news, enacting their own form of sacrifice.
La Tremouille, who remarried and kept fighting for the king and royal causes, died in the manner he had so resolutely approved in his son. At the disastrous battle of Pavia in 1525, he was wounded in the face and had his horse shot from under him. Remounted, he reached the king only to be shot dead at his side. His biographer intones the formula of loyalty, reflecting that La Tremoiuille “had often said that he wanted to die nowhere but on a bed of honor, that is, at the king's service in a just war.”92 His body was returned to France for burial in the collegiate church he had founded. He was shown the “honors customarily given in funeral rites for counts, princes, knights, and licit leaders in war, as he had well merited, as much for his honorable and correct life as for his noble acts and deeds.”93 Bouchet further assures readers that although he had been richly rewarded with offices and lands, all his lord's wages and pensions, and indeed all his revenue, had been spent in the service of the king and the public good.94 La Tremouille had amply earned the title of chevalier sans reproche, the blameless knight.95
La Tremouille's virtues certainly never suffer in the telling of his life by Jean Bouchet. A second knight who likewise won so elevated a title in the early sixteenth century, Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier Bayard, becomes even more a model of virtue in the pages of the biography by the humanist Symphorien Champier.96 Even if, as most readers might conclude, the book presents a glowing ideal for sixteenth-century chivalry rather than an actual man, its message is as important as it is clear, redoubling the theme of Jean Bouchet.97
Life of the Chevalier Bayard
Almost from the first page, in the dedicatory letter prefacing the volume, Champier praises the Chevalier Bayard both as “the mirror and model of all chivalry (le myrouer et exemple de toute chievalerie)” and for “the love he always had for the public good of the French nation (l'affection qu'il a eue tousjours au bien public de la nation de france).”98 Even Bayard's war cry is significant. In the press of battle he shouts out not his family name or that of hereditary lands or title, but “France! France!”99 If Champier strengthens this “national” theme through Bayard's chivalric career, he also strongly reinforces the religious dimension. The omnipotence and immanence of God (who seems to be French) moves out of the shadowy background of simple assumption (as in the life of La Tremouille) and takes the very foreground. The knight who serves the king serves his higher Lord as well, doing the divine will in a troubled world. That the wills of the Lord King and the Lord God might ever stand at odds never enters Champier's mind, or at least not his book.
A few pages set up Bayard's early life as he moves upward in the hierarchy of courts. After getting his start as a page in the household of the duke of Savoy, he soon entered the royal court of Charles VIII, where he earned from the king's own lips the nickname of “Spur (picque)” for his ability to tame horses.100 Unlike La Tremouille, he showed no interest in women and maintained a determined focus on warfare. Champier says he wanted never to be linked or subordinated to women and needed no immortality through his posterity; he simply wanted like an angel to ascend to the skies.101
As soon as Champier has brought Bayard to the age when he can become a fighting man, he presents a series of three martial episodes, each receiving its own chapter or two. All three serve to document Bayard's personal prowess functioning as an agency of God's will. In the first of these encounters, a French company is attacked by a Spanish company and Bayard fights more like a lion than a man; in fact, he takes great pleasure in the combat.102 Even the celebrated Aragonese champion named Alonzo Soto Majore surrenders. Bayard graciously allows him to return home in order to raise a ransom. The crucial twist quickly appears: with freedom secured, the Spaniard falsely claims he had suffered bad treatment when he should have been an honorable captive in Bayard's hands. No reader can doubt that the man will die for spreading this untruth. Champier's heading to the following chapter pointedly announces that when Bayard fought on foot against this Spanish champion “he killed him by the will of God.”103 Bayard had given Soto Majore the chance to correct his dishonoring lie before insisting on personal combat. He then generously agreed to fight on foot as his opponent insisted, despite his known superior skill as a horseman. He even agreed to fight while ill and recovering from a fever. These may be accurate details, but suspicion lingers that Champier is underscoring the divine will in effecting Bayard's victory.104 Champier even gives Bayard a speech lamenting that two Christians should have to fight; the great knight patiently explains that it is necessary only because he must defend his honor and must give an instructive example that no Christian should falsely impute evil to his brother, as a true Christian knight.105 Even when Alonzo has been laid flat on the ground by a devastating slash, Bayard sermonizes him; the liar must renounce his sinful claim and seek divine mercy. But it is too late. The man has bled to death. A weeping Bayard is pictured praying God to forgive the noble and chivalrous sinner and praying that God will forgive him as well, since he only wanted to save his honor. In remembrance of Christ who pardoned those who crucified him, Bayard himself pardons Alonzo.106 The role Champier gives him is that of noble agent of divine will, killing reluctantly to restore just order in a world disordered by sin.107
A second combat, involving thirteen Frenchmen against thirteen Spaniards, carries the theme forward.108 The Spanish ask for the combat, seeking revenge for the loss of their champion; but again they appear as agents of dishonor and sin. In the fight they deliberately kill eleven of the French mounts “against all that is honorable in chivalry and war.”109 Bayard loudly assures them that their act is useless, for “all victory comes from above and not from men.” Champier even insists that he pedantically shouted citations to the Book of Judges, to actions of Gideon, Sampson, and Debora, “and many others,” to drive home his point. Since the Spanish horses will not charge across a field littered with dead of their own kind, Bayard informs his enemies that the evidence is plain that God opposes them. Continuing his battlefield sermon, he exhorts them as fellow Christians to acknowledge their sin in killing harmless animals; “better it would have been to sell them and give the money to God's poor.”110 Of course, the thirteen Spaniards are soon routed by Bayard and a faithful companion, and even the eleven dismounted and captured Frenchmen are restored to freedom.
In the third encounter, the Chevalier Bayard plays Horatio at the bridge, though Champier surprisingly makes comparisons only to Hector, Pompey, and the good Christian knight Roland.111 Bayard holds back two hundred Spanish soldiers—leaving some of them floating in the river—until help reaches him. Champier must struggle to recognize the divine will in this fight, but he succeeds. The Spanish are guilty of a battlefield ruse (vostre cautelle contre le vouloir de dieu) and have offended divine wisdom (Rien ne vault prudence humaine, que on appelle cautelle, contre de dieu la sapience).112 He strengthens the point by having some Spaniards themselves declare that “God always keeps the bodies and honor of those men who do good and it would have been wrong had he been made a prisoner because he has a reputation as the knight beyond shame as he well demonstrated in the fight with Lord Alonzo.”113
Clearly a humanist model-maker is at work here. Champier, rather than the Chevalier Bayard, would be inclined to shout biblical citations at an enemy in the height of battle or to preach to him primly about selling good war mounts for poor relief.114 The drive to press an ideology leads Champier to present or invent an ideal, even as it leads him to find invariable Spanish sin and consistent French virtue. This very ideological drive, of course, remains the point for our inquiry. Bayard's prowess links with God's will and supports the most Christian king of France who always acts in accord with divine will.115
In these incidents the king remains in the background, though it is always his cause that is upheld. This emphasis on personal virtue in great knights appears again at the end of the book. After giving accounts of four worthy fellow knights from Bayard's own province of Dauphiné, Champier compares Bayard to a series of Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian heroes, in each case to Bayard's advantage.116 Throughout the rest of the book Champier, confident of having established Bayard's personal virtue, broadens his vision and stresses the king's wars, especially the Wars of Italy. Bayard the knight enforcing God's will appears painted in primary colors at the beginning and end of the account; in the bulk of the book his biographer adds the royalist tones: he shows Bayard as the servant of the crown and the upholder of the public good of the realm.
As the French campaigns in Italy begin, once again Champier emphasizes that Bayard rose from a sick bed to do his duty. He reports the very words the great knight spoke to him, dismissing Champier's civilian cautions: “in an emergency one must not fail his prince for anything, and it would be better to die with him than to die here shamefully.”117 Active in the campaigns in Italy, he is in the thick of the fighting and is soon wounded. Yet he again struggles out of the bed in which he is recovering to rejoin the king when needed.118 Wounded and captured, he is eventually ransomed by the king, albeit with distressing delay.119 In the midst of the renewed campaigning, Francis I asks Bayard to make him a knight. “Sire, one who is crowned, sworn, and anointed with oil from heaven,” Bayard responds significantly, “and is the king of so noble a realm, and is the first son of the church, is already a knight above all others.”120 When the king insists, Bayard draws his sword and knights his sovereign. He then joyfully declares that his sword should be kept as a relic and used in battle only against infidels. After two celebratory somersaults he replaces the blade and the ceremony is complete.121 Francis soon returned the favor by making him a Knight of the royal Order of Saint Michael.122
Bayard's sword was soon drawn again in what proved to be his last fight.123 Narrowly escaping capture as he defended an unfortified village, Bayard was shot and mortally wounded.124 Carried to a grove, he made his confession and his will.125 His only regret in dying, he said, was that he could no longer serve the king his sovereign and had to abandon the great royal affairs, which made him sorry and regretful. His prayer was that after his death the king would have such servants as he had wanted to be.126 Soon after uttering these royalist pieties he died. Champier says that the man whose firearm killed Bayard was disconsolate when he learned what heroic target his bullet had struck, that he swore never to fire another hacquebut, cursed its inventor for a device that killed the best knight in the world, and promised to retire to a monastery.127 Champier is no man for half measures.
These two texts leave no doubt about their message. The minimal compromise required of noble warriors was that they now work within a frame of lowered independence, that they recognize something at least becoming the state—the realm, the common good under the sovereign—as the proper beneficiary of their hard labors and the rightful conduit through which sacred honor came to them. Moreover, the sovereign as virtual head of religion in the realm (whatever formal statements were made regarding the papacy) stood in effect as mediator between the warriors and God—as leading clerics, theologians, and even the pope had never quite managed to do. The shell of chivalry remained polished and intact; yet its inner workings have changed dramatically. The old quasi-independent professionalism and individual acquisition of honor now had to be channeled through the state. Equally important, the warrior could no longer achieve salvation by his independent accumulation of ascetic merit, won sword in hand. The old direct relationship between the knight and the divine was gone: the monarch was acclaimed as necessary broker and in his service great knights won spiritual rewards.
Chivalric Ideology and the Tudor Monarchy
If the written lives of La Tremouille and Bayard are filled with what Symphorien Champier called “ceste impetuosité Galicque,”128 it was a quality bonded inseparably to royal service and religious valorization. Could anything similar appear in the damp isles across the Channel?129 We have already encountered the young Henry VIII self-consciously playing the role of his chivalrous predecessor Henry V, with the bulk of the English aristocracy in tow, banners waving and trumpets sounding for an invasion of France. Showing characteristic prudence, his daughter Elizabeth I strove for a more moderate balance between honor and obedience, encouraging a spirit of continued chivalry within her realm or at least within her court (and occasionally on inexpensive forays outside the realm), so long as the sovereign was recognized as repository and dispenser of honor. The jousting she sponsored to celebrate the anniversary of her accession provides a case in point. Even though she could not join in the sport and spectacle as her father had done, at least in his youth, chivalry was to serve royalty and she was the arbiter of honor. As she informed assembled troops in the famous review at Tilbury during the crisis of the Spanish Armada, she would herself “be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.”130 That the Earl of Essex should personally knight many of his followers on expeditions to Cadiz and in Ireland truly upset Elizabeth's sense of the properly royalist order of things. She was aware, as Aristotle had written, that “honour is felt to depend more on those who confer than on him who receives it.”131 The principle implies a degree of control that might raise eyebrows and hackles among the military elite. Sir Philip Sidney insisted on fighting a duel with a man who had impugned his honor, but when Elizabeth intervened to prevent it, he reluctantly had to subordinate his honor to her sovereignty. After he died on the battlefield at Zutphen (in 1586), a contemporary wrote—in words that would have pleased our French biographers of La Tremouille and Bayard—of Sidney's “manly woundes receiued in seruice of his Prince / in the open fielde, in Martiall Maner, the honorablest death that could be desired and best beseeming a Christian Knight.”132
Many lords could not easily accept such a point of view. In a court said to be divided between militia and togati, Lord Willoughby de Eresby pointedly asserted that “he was none of the reptilia,” suggesting that he would never crawl lizard-like at the approaching wave of what the Tudor historian Samuel Daniel termed “the Ocean of all-drowning Sov'renty.”133 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, famously did more than assert. After a career that included much field service and Bayard-like challenges to enemy champions, he forcefully claimed his rights in a botched act of rebellion that brought him to the scaffold. There he humbly voiced the official line that royal sovereignty trumped chivalric independence. His contemporaries wavered between admiration and horror over his actions. Some had expected Essex to be the new Protestant knight and crusader. Samuel Daniel, who had lamented that the present age was “not of that virilitie as the former,” wrote a play that seemed to debate whether chivalry came by royal grant or through innate virtue; he thought it prudent to offer to withdraw the play when criticized by Cecil.134
This close relationship and tension between a chivalric sense of independence and royal claims to control animated much in Tudor culture. Some scholars have found that political and cultural ideals important both to the crown and its powerful subjects were built into the very brick and stone of major works of architecture. Simon Thurley reads the Tudor style of the great palace of Hampton Court, for example, as a program of “chivalric eclecticism.”135 The tension was undoubtedly written into works of literature—both those that have become admired classic texts and works now masked in obscurity.136
The humbler works, though of infinitely lower aesthetic value, may make the point more clearly. Strenuous efforts to fit chivalry and royal sovereignty into the same frame of thought appear in Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars, written at the end of the Tudor era (1595–1623?). Though a work that may now be all but forgotten, as a sweeping narrative of late medieval aristocratic quarrels over the English throne and the arrival of the Tudors it is especially revealing.137 The old chivalric ethos of independent prowess appeals powerfully to Daniel. He wants honor to stem from danger bravely met in battle: “For, vile is honor, and a title vaine, / the which, true worth and danger do not gaine.”138 One side of his thought is immovably conservative. He devotes seven pages to a jeremiad against innovations such as “Artillerie, th'infernall instrument / New-brought from hell, to scourge imortalitie,” along with other devilish inventions (including the printing press).139 Two ringing lines given to Hotspur in the Fourth Book sing out the heroic creed concisely: “What? Haue we hands, and shall we seruille bee? / Why were swords made? But, to preserue men free.”140 Only a few pages later, however, he speaks of “that especial right of kings; the Sword,” and laments that Hotspur's cause was personal ambition and not the protection and defense of his country.141 Earlier, he admiringly shows how a deposed and imprisoned Richard II still plays the knight in his death scene; the king seizes a sword from one of his assailants and slays four of “These shameful beastes” with his “quicke and ready hand” before succumbing.142 Daniel will not give the title of knight to the “caitiff” who finally cuts Richard down:
To giue impietie this reuerent stile?
Title of honour, worth, and virtues right,
Should not be giuen to a wretch so vile.143
Knighthood and king-killing are incompatible. And as much as Daniel loves heroic deeds of prowess, he cannot stomach them in the cause of civil strife.144 In fact, a leitmotif in Daniel's account is his horror of civil war rending the kingdom; this steady theme grows out of his belief in a sound monarchy as guarantor of necessary social and political order. In the civil strife of the battle of St. Albans, he admonishes that “who did best, hath but dishonour won,” and the battle of Taunton he declared the “greatest day of ruine” for England.145 Richard McCoy justly argues that laboring under such deep-seated ambivalence, Daniel's great project could only falter and lie unfinished.146
Pragmatic treatises redouble the message of literary works. Sir Humphrey Gilbert's proposal for what amounted to a new royal university in the capital shows new ideas amid echoes of the medieval. Queene Elizabethe's Achademy, the book Gilbert presented to the queen about 1570, argued for a model education for royal wards and, by extension, for young noblemen in general; though it did not move the queen to found his school, the plan is revealing.147 He believes the youthful members of the elite are “estranged from all serviceable virtues to their prince and Cowntrey”148 and asserts they need a broader education than the narrow “schole leareninges” provided by Oxford and Cambridge or by the hunting and hawking of country gentlemen.149 Though he wants noble youths to have the use of a comprehensive scholarly library and be taught Greek and Latin grammar, he emphasizes learning in English in a wide range of pragmatic subjects, including mathematics for artillery and fortification, and law for their own affairs and for their governing roles as sheriffs and justices of the peace. If this educational plan truly sounds new, the older tradition also surfaces in a call for learning the joust, riding at the ring, and mastering heraldry, no less than mounted pistol practice and the firing of hacqbuts, marching, map-making, and the use of cannon. In fact, Gilbert assures Elizabeth in his closing argument that the center will be “an Achademy of Philosophie and Chiualrie” or even, a few lines later, “a most noble Achademy of Chiuallric policy and philosophie.”150 He has already pointedly assured his sovereign that in his institution “all the best sorte shalbe trained vp in the knowledge of gods word (which is the onely fowndacion of true obedience to the prince).”151
The issues that so troubled Samuel Daniel and animated Humphrey Gilbert were hardly settled in their lifetimes. The case stands rather that they are being debated and are moving in a significant direction in late Tudor days. Elements of the heroic ideal near the heart of chivalric thinking expired—or were transformed—slowly, but their final rituals seem to have taken place under royal patronage.152 Is it not interesting that genuine tilting might often in the Tudor period be termed “Jousts Royal”?153 The handwriting was on the wall, but perhaps under Tudor monarchs sufficient clarity for the line to be filled on the death certificate of chivalry was still in process. Chivalric ideology drew strength from an intertwined set of ideals that could not be severed all at once. It was a Jacobean author, Thomas Milles, who wrote a resolute defense of honor resting within the sovereign's gift, in his treatise titled “The Catalogue of Honour, or Treasury of True Nobility, Peculiar to Great Britain” (1610). He concluded that “our Kinges (who onely and alone, do in their kingdome bear the absolute rule and sway) are with us efficient causes of all POLITICAL NOBILITY.”154
Emphasizing a respublica governed by citizen/administrators, the new learning gradually undermined surviving defenses of chivalry that lasted beyond traditional ending points for the medieval era. As in so many sieges, the process was slow. Vigorous praise of virtu, of heroic militarism—even of chivalry—in the beloved classical past, complicated matters. The great soul of Erasmus might long for peace, but the shadow of Turkish advance moved even him; Symphorien Champier, writing of the Chevalier Bayard, had fewer scruples about war and violence.
Conclusion
Can any cause be entered on the death certificate of chivalric ideology? Prudent legal counsel might suggest adding an appendix to that document, replete with scholarly qualifications (what medieval counsel would term a schedule sewn to the main parchment). The negative results have seemed easiest to discern. As a complex set of ideas and practices, chivalry cannot be hurried off the stage like a stiffening corpse. Its life did not suddenly end in a flash and smoke produced by black powder. Changes in military organization, the size, training, and equipping of armies, especially in relation to the growth of state power, are more subtle and complex; these changes still generate debate. Yet much scholarship doubts that even organizational improvements in the military can claim the role of prime mover. What is more, most scholars look as late as the seventeenth century for cumulative effects of processes emerging over generations, if not centuries. If military revolution seems less likely than military evolution, the change constitutes an important accomplice, but is unlikely to sustain a solitary murder charge.
Powerfully shifting currents in ideas may likewise have their charge reduced to acting as accessories rather than prime suspects. In the abstract, reforming ideas of religion and the new scholarship—when irenic and antiheroic—were too radical, too disruptive of social discipline, order, and hierarchy, for any elite to subscribe to them or implement them fully, certainly not in an age of struggles between religious groups that finally took their appeals to arms. If not primary, this role as accessories was far from unimportant. New ideas may be necessary for the radical transformation of old ideas; and the process moves all the more swiftly if the newcomers are associated with effective power.
The chivalric code could finally be transformed (and not killed outright) only as sovereign governmental power increased, blessed by religion in both Protestant and Roman Catholic lands, and praised lavishly by practitioners of the new learning.155 What shifted so significantly was the agency that mediated between heroic deeds and merit, between divine will and armed power. This pivotal role came into the hands of sovereigns. Royal administrations garnered a function long claimed by the church universal, and within their more limited areas of responsibility they achieved a more generous measure of success. The states under construction would become effective managers of sheer military power; warriors followed their dictates and absorbed their ideas and propaganda with less independence and reformulation than we saw them exercise in their relationship with the church.156 Sovereigns enforced their claim to define and dispense blessings for valorous service. It came to be the sovereign who bestows honor on the deserving—a logical extension of capacity for rulers who had long been judging disputes and claims of the elite, taxing their wealth, and working to define and limit the legitimacy of their violence within the realm. Over centuries, sovereign lords had gradually succeeded in asserting divine approval for their growing role. Warriors who had accepted this insertion of royal authority into society now found it difficult to claim an independent basis for honor, personally choosing the causes, actions, and venues in which to perform their acts of prowess, confident (as was Geoffroi de Charny) that through shining deeds they would forever inscribe their honor within the lasting memory of a body of international professionals. Royal valorization of the heroic might still ultimately work through the hands of loyal churchmen, with their voices raised in blessing; but royal authority to call upon this blessing was in as little doubt as the ultimate beneficiary. Virtual national churches under increasing lay control had emerged from the Late Middle Ages, even before the church universal fractured repeatedly across much of Europe.157 Clerical dreams on the scale of Gregory VII or Innocent III—visions of directing ideal warriors within an ideal religious European society–had evaporated. By the early sixteenth century a single church no longer spoke for all of Western Europe and could no longer assert final claims on the use of armed force; in national or regional churches the sword was in effect directed by princes and sovereigns rather than ecclesiastics, and even in Catholic countries the directive voice of Rome was much muted by the voice of each sovereign. Warfare against the heads of these states by those living within them had (by a process long in preparation) become treason and, upon failure, was recognized even by the rebels as sinful.158 The sovereign who awarded honor to individuals stood as head of the collective body that received divine blessing or suffered divine wrath. Few readers of the biographies of Louis La Tremouille or the Chevalier Bayard could doubt that even before religious war had hit stride, a crusading character had been infused into the accounts of their fighting for the righteous and most Christian king of France.
The warriors still enjoyed a special path to heavenly bliss, but it now passed through gateways prominently bearing royal insignia. Of necessity, the clerics (Protestant or Catholic) accepted the change and in most realms even loyally eased the new pattern into life, praying for those agents and blessing those actions that favored royal sovereignty under the watchful and approving eye of God (who was Protestant or Catholic as the case demanded). The death certificate of chivalry was issued—quietly and in properly oblique language—as a state document under the sovereign's seal. But it also carried innumerable signatures of humanist scholars and royalist clerics who served as willing and obedient witnesses and who helped to give the process legitimacy through their fervent blessing.