by The Laird o’Thistle
June 22 2008
On Monday, April 16, 2008, Prince William of Wales was inducted by his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, as the 1,000th enrolled Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter. His supporters in the ceremony of induction, which took place in the Garter Throne Room in Windsor Castle, were his grandfather and father, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh and HRH the Prince of Wales. He then took part for the first time in the procession of the Order down the hill to St. George’s Chapel for the annual service of the Order. Prince Harry and Kate Middleton were among the onlookers from the chapel’s Galilee Porch. The day marked what is believed to be the 660th anniversary of the founding of the Order by the royal family’s ancestor, King Edward III of England; and it was also the 60th anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip’s induction into the Order by her father King George VI.
More than any other event thus far in his life, becoming a Knight of the Garter marks William’s full entry into the ceremonial life of the British monarchy. The tie between the Crown and the Order is unbroken across the nearly seven centuries of its history, and across most of that time the Garter has been the honor above all honors revered by the royal family itself. It is the oldest and most venerated order of chivalry in Europe, and most of the current crowned heads of Europe are so-called “Stranger Knights” above and beyond the statutory twenty-four. All of the Queen’s children and several of her cousins are Knights and Ladies of the Garter, the various royals also being eligible “extras” above and beyond the official twenty-four. The modern version of the Garter Day ceremonial was established by the Queen’s father as recently as 1948 when the annual church service was restored, and it remains intimately tied to the identity of the House of Windsor. So, in recognition of the occasion, I thought it appropriate to focus this month on a bit of the history of “the Order of St. George and the Garter” … which is a more ancient version of the name.
The most cited historian of the Order of the Garter is the seventeenth-century scholar Elias Ashmole, for whom the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford is named. His history of the Order written in the era of Charles II (1672) is still widely cited as authoritative. Hampering Ashmole’s historical project, however, was the fact that the records of the first century of the Order are lost, and only a few contemporary chronicles mention the founding. The well-known legend of Edward III and the fallen garter of the Countess of Salisbury — a.k.a. Joan of Kent, the niece of Edward II, wife of Edward the “Black Prince,” and mother of Richard II — dates from almost two hundred years after the fact. And I must say that I find the story the least credible among the several tales connected to the founding of the Order. (But, it is a tale that fits very well with the ethos of the court of Charles II, which was Ashmole’s contemporary context.) Other hints and clues to an alternative story of the Order’s origins lie buried in earlier fragments, and in some of the symbols of the Order.
What is known for sure is that around 1344 Edward III announced his intention to revive the Arthurian round table, but that effort quickly came to naught. So, somewhere around 1348-1350 Edward founded a different order dedicated to “St. George and the Garter.” It was, in fact, Edward III who made St. George the patron saint of England, displacing his own namesake and predecessor, St. Edward the Confessor.
George was a Syrian saint (St. Gurja) whose cult had become prominent during the crusades. The popular legend portrays him as a “knight” martyred in the days of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. St. George’s most famous feat, according to the account in Jacob of Vorgaine’s Golden Legend, was the slaying of a dragon while rescuing a maiden. In that tale, the maiden at one point uses her girdle — i.e., her belt — as a leash for the dragon. And I wonder if the “garter” may, in fact, have originally been intended to represent the maiden’s girdle. (It may be noteworthy that a girdle also figures in the contemporaneous legend of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a tale which lays claim to the Garter motto as well.)
In any event, Saint George was particularly venerated in Palestine. He is said to have appeared over the crusading armies in the course of an early battle against the Muslims, in some accounts at the battle for Jerusalem itself. His special relationship with England and the royal family seems to have originated with Richard the Lionhearted, who “restored” St. George’s tomb at Lydda during his time in the Middle East. In the lore of the region St. George was associated with the ancient Hebrew prophet Elijah, and also with the mysterious Muslim saint al-Khidir, the “Green One.” The Golden Legend version of St. George’s life includes an Elijah-like tale of a contest with pagan priests and fire falling from heaven. But it is the Muslim connection that may be particularly significant, given the existence of a Sufi chivalrous order dedicated to al-Khidir, founded in the thirteenth century that has been seen by many as strikingly similar to the Order of the Garter. (The Sufis are the mystics of Islam, sometimes accused over the centuries of being secretly sympathetic with Christianity by some of the more orthodox and fundamentalist elements within Islam.)
Somewhere about the year 1200, the official Sufi-inspired order of chivalry was founded by the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, al-Nasir al-Din Allah (1180-1225), who became the order’s Grand Master. But that order was based on earlier, informal groupings of so-called “chivalrous youth.” The ideal of the order was the promotion of “noble manhood” expressed in generosity and self-sacrifice. Initiates pledged their loyalty to the master who inducted them, they wore special vestments, “drank from the cup of knighthood”, and added the arms of the order to their personal heraldry. Their motto, according to Sufi scholar Idries Shah, spoke of the mystical Saki, the cupbearer, and some have seen a translingual play on words between the motto of the Sufi order and the Garter motto: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (meaning, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it!”). Shah further elaborates that the members of this eastern knightly order gathered in circles of thirteen members, as did their later western counterparts. The new order spread quickly throughout the Muslim world, and Shah sees it as the clear precursor of the orders of chivalry founded by Christian monarchs beginning in the fourteenth century.
Although Richard the Lionhearted’s sojourn in Palestine ended in 1192, some years before the founding of the Caliph’s official order of chivalry, it is notable that Richard is said to have bestowed leather garters on certain of his knights during the siege at Acre in 1191. The combination of this story with that of Richard’s devotion to St. George makes me strongly wonder if the odd combination of St. George and the Garter was not intentionally modeled by Edward III on the legends surrounding his ancestral uncle. (The fact that Edward III’s grandson and eventual heir was also named Richard lends some weight to this scenario.) The core elements of the Order of the Garter certainly seem to hearken to those present in Palestine around the time of Richard I’s crusade. (The historian in me is wondering if the founding of the Order of the Garter was at least in part intended to help establish something of an English counter-myth to balance the rival French legends of the great crusader-king, St. Louis.)
The Order of St. George and the Garter founded by Edward III consisted of himself and his eldest son, the Black Prince, and a dozen “knights companion” for each of them, the basic model still followed today. The first knights included a number of Edward’s longtime allies. Men who had been active in the opposition to Edward II’s despised “favorites” during the previous reign, and who later assisted young Edward III in the overthrow of his domineering mother and her lover. According to the contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, Edward’s aim in founding the Order was to unite both his subjects and foreigners in “the bonds of amity and peace.” At the time of the founding, Edward also established a chantry of twelve priests at Windsor and a body of “impoverished knights” who were to be supported by the perpetual charity of the Order. These “Poor Knights” survive to this day, now known as the “Military Knights of Windsor.” One would suppose that the first of these knights were drawn from among the veterans of the first decade of the Hundred Years War. From the founding to the present the Order’s great occasion is the annual feast day of April 23… now deferred to the Monday after the Trooping of the Color in June.
The Order’s blue robes carried (then and now) the arms of St. George, a red crusader’s cross on a white field. Some believe the Garter itself, blue and gold, betokens Edward III’s claim to the French throne, over which the Hundred Years War began. Idries Shah, however, relates the garter and the colors to Sufi meanings derived from Attar the Chemist’s mystical poem, “Parliament of the Birds.” (The blue betokens mourning at being separated from the Beloved — i.e., God. The gold represents the alchemical gold of the perfected human being.)
Edward III’s founding of the Order of the Garter is also deeply intertwined with the physical history of Windsor Castle, which has been its home base from the beginning. In the years beginning just before 1360, Edward III decided to reconstruct the buildings of the upper ward at Windsor to provide for the first time truly palatial accommodations and grand state apartments for the court. The “architect” for the project was William of Wykeham (d. 1404). Wykeham is believed to have been a serf’s son who rose from his post of clerk of works to become Bishop of Winchester. He served as occasional Chancellor of England under both Edward III and Richard II. He was an ally of Edward the Black Prince, and it can be assumed that he also was closely involved in the founding of the Order of the Garter, since throughout its history the successive Bishops of Winchester have by statute held the office of “prelate” of the order.
The first project of this period at Windsor was a planned circular banqueting house for the “round table” of King Arthur, which may have been made (or, remodeled) for Edward III at the time when he first thought of reviving the legendary Arthurian order of knighthood. The tabletop survives today – with its painted images dating to the Tudor era – and is on display at Winchester, but the banqueting house project was abandoned. (It may be through Bishop William that the table eventually arrived at Winchester Castle. I have not been able to find this out.)
Edward III’s work at Windsor was massive and the resulting edifices remained for three hundred years until the time of Charles II’s reconstruction, which in turn lasted until the reconstruction done by George IV in the early nineteenth century. Wykeham’s ground-plan and significant parts of the work remain to this day. At the heart of the construction was the original St. George’s Hall, intended as the site of the ceremonial banquets of the Order of St. George. This principal chamber of the castle continues to serve as the site of major royal banquets in its newest splendid incarnation, undertaken following the great fire of 1992. Another part of the fourteenth-century project was the reconstruction of the Round Tower on the great motte at the heart of the castle. In Edward III’s day it was called the “Devil’s Tower”. (Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover why.) The chapel of St. Edward the Confessor built by Edward III’s great-grandfather, Henry III, was also enlarged and embellished, and its dedication was extended to include St. George. (It would later be replaced, beginning in the 1470s, by the current St. George’s Chapel.) Given all this, it might not be inappropriate to suggest that perhaps the most accurate name for the Order would be “the Order of St. George, the Garter, and Windsor Castle.”
Compared to the Garter, the Scottish Order of the Thistle is quite Johnny-come-lately into the ranks of chivalry. Although it is claimed to have been a revival of an older order, it really only dates back to the time of the ill-fated James VII / II in the late 17th century, and its beautiful wee chapel only dates back to the reign of the Queen’s grandparents, George V and Queen Mary. I do, however, rather prefer the deep green color of the Thistle’s robes and sashes, and the appropriately prickly motto (“Nemo Me Impune Lacessit”) which means “No one provokes me with impunity!” In my opinion, the Scots would have been somewhat better served if James VII had looked to the stories of his royal Scottish ancestors such as David I (a.k.a. St. David), or David’s mother St. Margaret… but that would have been just too utterly Catholic for those times. (Not that James ever really gave a hoot about that!) St. David’s vision of the deer with the cross in its antlers would have been a great founding legend!
One final note about William’s Garter investiture… among the most precious (and virtually priceless) items of the Garter regalia are the golden collars worn on the robes with the pendant figure of St. George. Apparently, the oldest of the surviving collars dates from the 17th century and originally belonged to William’s maternal ancestor, the Duke of Abercorn. I would love to think that he was allowed to wear that collar last Monday.
Yours Aye,
– Ken Cuthbertson