KNIGHTHOOD 125 authorities that "the highest and the lowest dignities are universal, for if the king of a foreign nation come into England by leave of the king of this realm (as it ought to be), in this case he shall sue and be sued by the name of a king, so shall he sue and be sued by the name of a knight wheresoever he received that degree of dignity, but other wise it is as of a duke, marquess, earl, or other title of honour given by any foreign king." 1 The well-known story told by Camden about Queen Elizabeth and Sir Thomas Arundel afterwards Lord Arundel of Wardour, and her disinclination that "her sheep should bear a stranger s mark," and "dance after the whistle of every foreigner," had reference to a countship of the empire, and not to knighthood or an order of chivalry. Even to the end of the last century indeed any knight duly dubbed abroad was fully accepted as a knight in England. Hence when in 1792, at the request of the king of Sweden, George III. invested Sir Sidney Smith with the grand cross and collar of the Swedish Order of the Sword, it was ex pressly announced that he " was not knighted on this occasion, that ceremony having been performed by his Lite Swedish majesty." 2 By certain regulations, however, mule in 182 3, and repeated and enlarged in 1855, not only is it provided that the sovereign s permission by royal warrant shall be necessary for the reception by a British subject of any foreign order of knighthood, but further that such permission shall not authorize " the assumption of any style, appellation, rank, precedence, or privilege appertaining to a knight bachelor of the United Kingdom." Moreover, no permission of the kind will be granted " unless the foreign order shall have been conferred in consequence of active and distinguished service before the enemy either at sea or in the field," or unless the person receiving it shall have been " actually and entirely " em ployed beyond the British dominions " in the service of the Foreign sovereign bv whom the order is conferred." 3 la- Since knighthood was accorded either by actual investi ture or its equivalent, a counter process of degradation was regarded as necessary for the purpose of depriving anybody who had once received it of the rank and condition it im plied. And in this respect there can be no doubt that the order of chivalry was designedly assimilated to the order of priesthood. 4 Hence, as Selden points out, " as by the canon laws the ceremony of degradation from any degree of any order is by the solemn taking away those things from the clerk wherewith he was so invested at his taking the order from which he is to be degraded, so the ceremonies of degra dation of a knight were in ancient times such as that the sword with which he was girt afc his knighting and the spurs that were put on him were to be publicly taken off from him, and some other solemnities were sometimes in it." 5 The cases in which a knight has been formally de graded, in England are exceedingly few, so few indeed that two only are mentioned by Segar. writing in 1602, and Dallaway says that only three were on record in the College of Arms when he wrote in 1793. But in illustration of the statement of Coke that " when a knight is degraded one of his punishments is quod clypeus suus gentilicius reversus erit, and how his arms be reversed that he beareth none," Sir Harris Nicolas states that in an illuminated copy of Matthew Paris s Historia Major, among the royal manuscripts in the British Museum, there is a representa tion of Sir William de Marisco, who was convicted of treason in the reign of Henry III., with his sword and 1 Law of Nobility, p. 129. " London Gazette, May 19, 1792. 3 London Gazette, December 6, 1823, and May 15, 1855. 4 On the Continent very elaborate ceremonies, partly heraldic and partly religious, were observed in the degradation of a knight, which are described by Sainte Palaye, Mtmoires, vol. i. p. 316 sq., and after him by Mills, History of Chivalry, vol. i. p. 60 sq. 5 Titles of Honor, p. 653. the staff of his banner broken and his shield hewn asunder. 6 With this exception, however, the earliest known example of degradation from knighthood is that of Sir Andrew Harclay, who was created earl of Carlisle by Edward II., and was attainted of high treason in the year following his creation. He was tried and condemned at Carlisle in 1323 by special commission under Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, the king s half-brother. A part of his sentence, as preserved in the record, was in the following words: "que vous soietz degrade, que vous perdetz noun de count pur vous et pur vous heirs a touts jours que vous soietz deceynt del espee que vous esporeuns d orrees soient coupez de talouns," which having been done, according to Holingshed, Sir Anthony Lucy, the sheriff of Cumberland, said to him, ( Andrew, thou art no knight, but thou art a knave," when judgment for treason was pronounced on him, and he was immediately beheaded. 7 The next case was that of Sir Ralph Grey, which occurred in the reign of Edward IV. He was tried and convicted of treason, before John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, constable of England in 1468, but the sentence as preserved by Stowe seems to indicate that the ceremonies of degrada tion were to be remitted. 8 The last case was that of Sir Francis Michell in 1621, whose spurs were hacked from his heels, his sword belt cut, and his sword broken over his head by the heralds in Westminster Hall. 9 The ceremony of de grading a knight who is a companion of an order which as a capitular body has a chapel assigned to it applies to his achievements therein displayed more markedly than to him in person. On the degradation of a Knight of the Garter, indeed, a deputation of the companions are (Ashmole says) to go to him, attended by Garter king of arms, who " in a solemn manner first takes from him his George and riband and then his garter." 10 But the principal observances are that his banner, helm, and armorial plate are torn down from above and from off his stall by the officers of arms, and are by them spurned or kicked out of the building. 11 From the Order of the Garter William Lord Paget, who was subsequently rein stated, was degraded in 1552, "chiefly," according to the diary of Edward VI., " because he was no gentleman of blood neither of father s side or mother s side." 12 The degradation in due form of James, duke of Monmouth, and of James, duke of Ormond, for treason occurred severally in 1685 and 1716, Thomas Lord Cochrane and Sir Eyre Coote were similarly degraded from the Order of the Bath in 1814 and 1816. But in all these cases the knights retained their knighthood, although they were expelled from the orders to which they had belonged. Eoughly speaking, the age of chivalry properly so called Decline may be said to have extended from the beginning of the of _ crusades to the end of the Wars of the Roses. Within the cllivalr J - limits cf that period, which comprised about four hundred years, all that was peculiarly characteristic of it arose, at tained to maturity, and fell into decay. It is true that some of its spirit and many of its external forms lingered on throughout the greater part of the 16th century. But the chivalry of Francis I. and Charles V. bore much the same relation to the chivalry of Edward III. and the Black Prince that the romance of Don Quixote bears to the romance of Amadis de Gaul. As a practical mili tary system chivalry was entirely at an end. The revolu- Nicolas, British Orders of Knighthood, p. xxviii. 7 Selden, Titles of Honor, p. 654. 8 Nicolas, Orders of Knighthood, p. xxvii. ; Selden, Titles of Honor, p. 655. > Dallaway s Heraldry, p. 303. 10 Order of the Garter, p. 621. 11 Warrants for taking down the achievements and for the degra dation of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, and Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, are given by Ashmole, Appendices clxxxiii. and clxxxiv. 12 Beltz, Memorials, p. xcvi.
