Tea at Trianon: Can Chivalry Return?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Can Chivalry Return?

From Charles Coulombe:

Knighthood was the state of being an armored warrior on horseback, in the days when cannon and rifles had not yet banished those worthies from the battlefield. Chivalry was the code by which they attempted to live. Both were the result of marrying the Catholic Faith to Roman civilisation and the Germanic martial ardour that conquered that civilisation. To put it another way, it was the Christianisation of war. As Leon Gautier put it in his masterful work, Chivalry: “Chivalry is the Christian form of the military profession: the knight is the Christian soldier.” The Crusades had the effect of crystallising the chivalric institution, as did such practices as the Truce and the Peace of God, the knighting ceremony (a version of which found its way into the Roman Pontificale), and membership in the military orders. These latter — the Templars (later dissolved, but whose Portuguese and Aragonese branches survived), Knights Hospitaller (later of Malta), and Teutonic Order, to name a few — were regular religious orders whose vocation was to the battlefield, as others are to contemplation, teaching, or missionary work. Impressed by their work and loyalty to the Faith, late medieval kings gathered their own royal orders of knights around their persons. Moreover, as the centuries wound on, knighthood — which had been open to any proficient in arms and willing to observe the code of chivalry, and which could be conferred by any other knight, bishop, or sovereign — became ever more exclusive. More and ever more, it was conferred solely on those of noble or gentle birth by a monarch. The latter came to be sole fons honorum for his country, and many coronation rites symbolised this role by the conferring of spurs upon the new King. This was of course one of the many symptoms of the transformation of feudal Europe intonation-states. A parallel development was the arrival of gunpowder that drove the knight off the battlefield. (Read more.)