Shame and Honor

A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter

Stephanie Trigg

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812206630
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

"It's a nice piece of pageantry.... Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."—HRH Prince Philip, Duke of EdinburghFounded by Edward III in 1348, the Most Noble Order of the Garter is the highest chivalric honor among the gifts of the Queen of England and an institution that looks proudly back to its medieval origins. But what does the annual Garter procession of modern princes and politicians decked out in velvets and silks have to do with fourteenth-century institutions? And did the Order, in any event, actually originate in the wardrobe malfunction of the traditional story, when Edward held up his mistress's dropped garter for all to see and declared it to be a mark of honor rather than shame? Or is this tale of the Order's beginning nothing more than a vulgar myth?With steady erudition and not infrequent irreverence, Stephanie Trigg ranges from medieval romance to Victorian caricature, from imperial politics to medievalism in contemporary culture, to write a strikingly original cultural history of the Order of the Garter. She explores the Order's attempts to reform and modernize itself, even as it holds onto an ambivalent relationship to its medieval past. She revisits those moments in British history when the Garter has taken on new or increased importance and explores a long tradition of amusement and embarrassment over its formal processions and elaborate costumes. Revisiting the myth of the dropped garter itself, she asks what it can tell us about our desire to seek the hidden sexual history behind so venerable an institution.Grounded in archival detail and combining historical method with reception and cultural studies, Shame and Honor untangles 650 years of fact, fiction, ritual, and reinvention.

PART I

Ritual Histories

Chapter 1

Ritual Theory and Medievalism

On receipt of the command from Her Majesty I will proceed to the Legislative Assembly where the door is slammed in my face.

—Australian state of Victoria’s parliamentary Black Rod, 1954

The startling sentence that provides the epigraph to this chapter appears in a typescript of several pages in the parliamentary archives of the Australian state of Victoria.¹ The typescript probably dates from 1954, when the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II was making her first tour of Australia. The type-written instructions seem to have been prepared by the Usher of the Black Rod in preparation for the Queen’s opening of the Victorian Parliament, on a rare visit from the head of state. The text sets out the procedure, modeled on Westminster parliamentary custom, whereby Black Rod summons the members of the lower house to join the upper for a joint sitting to open the parliamentary term. Calmly the document anticipates an act of violence against its narrator.

This text represents a kind of fold or wrinkle in time. It brings together a fourteenth-century institution with a seventeenth-century crisis at the twentieth-century high point of royal popularity. The office of Black Rod was inaugurated by Edward III at Windsor in the 1350s, and was associated directly with the Order of the Garter by 1399.² The Usher of the Black Rod is the chief officer in English and Commonwealth parliaments, a role matched in the United States by an officer with the equally medieval title of Sergeant at Arms. Black Rod’s rejection by the lower house is of more recent origin and dates from the dramatic events of 1642, when Charles I entered the chamber of the House of Commons with an armed guard, seeking to arrest five of its members. The attempt failed, and the members escaped. Since then no monarch has entered the Commons chamber during proceedings, a convention that in Australia is maintained both in the Federal Parliament and in those state parliaments that have two houses (all except Queensland). In this “Westminster tradition” the Usher of the Black Rod summons the members of the lower house to a joint sitting at the opening of every parliamentary session, but the door is customarily closed against him or her. He or she raps three times on the door with the rod of his or her office and gains admittance to deliver the invitation. The members then proceed to the upper house, although the manner of their moving sometimes reflects the tradition of rivalry between the two houses: there is a convention in Westminster, at least, according to which the members do not hasten but proceed quite slowly, to signal their legislative independence from both the monarch and the House of Lords.³ It is a form of ceremonial practice in which many take great delight: the thirty-ninth session of the Victorian Parliament had already been opened by the Governor of Victoria in December 1952 after the general election, but the session was prorogued so that the time-honored ritual, with its tangible links to seventeenth-century England, could be performed again to celebrate the Queen’s presence as head of state.⁴

This is the world of ritual practice, where actions that might seem either bizarre or perfectly ordinary in everyday reality are planned with formal precision and performed with great solemnity, where careful consideration is given to the smallest details and variations, and where active pleasure is taken in rehearsing gestures and words that might commemorate deeds, events, and words that took place or were spoken long ago. In this world time slows down, both to ensure that all parts of the ritual are enacted fully and to allow for communal meditation on the significance of the actions and events being recalled. It is a world where future events are predicted with the absolute certainty of the normative, cosmologically weighted present tense and passive voice: “where the door is slammed in my face.” More specifically, it is the world of historical ritual practice, strongly mediated by cultural memory of a specific event, although ritual repetition has the distinctive capacity to transfigure what may be unpleasant, awkward, or embarrassing into something pleasant, formulaic, and honorable. The instructions prepared by the Victorian Black Rod in 1954 belong firmly to this world. Lovingly, the document embraces the idea of an insult or public shaming in the service of tradition and the fulfilment of the ritual. As we will see again and again in the history of the Order of the Garter, ritual practice often works to turn a moment of disruption, social embarrassment, or shame into the honor of immaculate theatrical or ritual performance.

I begin with this example for several reasons. I do not mean to suggest that the Order of the Garter currently enjoys the same authority as it did in the fourteenth century, or that the lines of continuity between the Order’s first foundation and this colonial iteration are unbroken. In truth, they are worlds apart. Nevertheless, Black Rod’s instructions are a symptomatic instance of Garter cultural history, from which it will be possible to tease out a number of questions and problems that thread through this book. I have also chosen an instance of ritual practice that is very far in geographical, historical, and cultural terms from the conventional starting points, trajectories, and parameters of Garter histories, as a sign of my own attempt to disrupt the rituals of conventional Garter historiography.

This chapter introduces some of the problems and challenges of the long history of the Garter, and some of the interpretive strategies that frame its discussions. It concludes with a brief history of the Order, to provide a diachronic frame for the work of subsequent chapters.

Rods and Rituals

In the world of ritual practice, the door not being slammed in Black Rod’s face would represent an infraction of the customary rules and a transgression of the ritual norm. Most discussions of ritual stress their repetition and continuity, as if their meaning and significance emerge naturally from those elements that are successfully repeated on subsequent occasions. But the world of ritual practice is often also marked by disruption. Many will immediately think of Franz Kafka’s parable of the leopards who break into the temple and drink from the sacrificial chalices so regularly that this incursion becomes predictable and is incorporated into the ceremonial ritual.⁵ Kafka’s parable has often been taken up by literary critics and theorists to deconstruct the once stable hierarchy of primary text and secondary commentary, but it also applies in quite practical terms to many rituals. The slamming of the door against Black Rod is a good example of a singular act of violence becoming a celebrated component of traditional practice. We might even argue that the myth of the dropped garter operates in the same way: the social ritual of a court dance threatens to collapse into chaos and disorder until the king rescues the occasion and promises to found a chivalric order in honor of the moment.

Moments of disruption are also of central importance to the practice of ritual commentary, although this importance sometimes emerges retrospectively. For example, Paul Strohm shows how, after the deposition of Richard II, the pro-Lancastrian Adam of Usk “recalled” three incidents at Richard’s coronation that he read as prefiguring the king’s calamitous end: the boy had lost one of his coronation shoes, one of his golden spurs had fallen off, and a gust of wind was said, however implausibly, to have blown the crown from his head at the banquet. Strohm describes Usk’s “imaginative construct, weaving actual and invented details into an explanatory pattern,” whereby prophecies about the king’s downfall were seen as starting to come true from the moment of the boy’s coronation.⁶ Thus the shameful aberration of a poor reign is absorbed into a grander narrative of national history and prophetic wisdom. In the same way, the “shameful” story of the Countess of Salisbury’s garter will be absorbed into the rich contradictory traditions and modern reiterations of the Order.

Much later, and from the secondary perspective of ritual commentary, a messy performance can become an object lesson in a study of national character. James Robinson Planché, who was made Rouge Croix herald in 1854, writes of a bungled ceremony in 1856 that was designed to celebrate the peace between England and Russia after the Crimean War. As the junior pursuivant, Planché was supposed to demand entrance to the city of London at Temple Bar, but on his arrival, he found the gates on which he was supposed to knock had never been closed. “I was, consequently, obliged to send a trooper to call them back, and get the stupid people, whose business it was, to shut the gates in my face, that I might knock at them and have them opened again by the City Marshal, with the usual formalities, in obedience to my instructions.”⁷ Insisting on its repetition and correct performance may weaken the ritual somewhat, but it also underlines the commemorative symbolism of the protocol: the autonomy of the city. Planché introduces this anecdote with an intriguing reflection on the current state of English heraldic ritual and its implications for national identity: “It would have been quite un-English if such a ceremony had passed off without a blunder of some sort; and a most ludicrous one took place on this occasion.” Even when the ritual performance fails it is still possible to recuperate a different version of honor by appealing to national sentiment and identity.

Planché’s gloomy expectation of a ceremonial blunder may come as a surprise to those who associate English protocol with perfected form and military precision. It certainly contrasts with Victorian Black Rod’s careful instructions in 1954. But as David Cannadine has demonstrated, the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth saw dramatic improvements in the smooth performance of royal and parliamentary ritual, in both the United Kingdom and its former colonies.⁸ I return to this aspect of royal ritual in Chapter 5.

The Victorian parliamentary document still seems strange. Black Rod’s instructions set out what will happen and what he must do, although the ceremony is probably the best known of all his duties. The text renews the ritual in the present tense, independent of any given performance, and offers up its own distinctive language for commentary. The most significant word is the vehement “slammed.” In contrast to the formal language of “receiving” commands and “proceeding” to the lower house, this vigorous instruction recalls the highly charged emotions that gave rise to the original action being commemorated ten thousand miles away and three hundred years later. The sound of slamming doors reverberates across space and time, but the text reminds the participants that ritual actions are best performed with dramatic immediacy. The passage of centuries should not seem to dilute the force of the action or its significance: by slamming the door, the members of the lower house can rehearse or perform the anger of their precedessors at the threat to parliamentary privilege in 1642. And by commemorating the action in equally strong language, this informal little document stakes its own claim to be considered part of the ritual and its associated traditions of rehearsal and performance. Its first-person narration, moreover, adds a singular dimension to the customary impersonality of historical ritual practice.

But as we will see repeatedly, rituals are often disrupted and changed. The Victorian Parliament had been inaugurated in 1856 but instituted the office of Black Rod only in 1951, just three years before the Queen’s visit, when the Parliament celebrated the centenary of its first Legislative Council. The three-year-old Rod was of an elaborate design (including a bas-relief of St. George and the Dragon underneath its base), but the tip was made only of gold-covered plaster affixed to the wooden shaft. A wooden cap had been planned to protect the tip but was not ready, and the plaster tip would have shattered if it had struck the door. An information brochure from the Parliament tells us what happened in 1951: “Mr. Tierney strode to the door and, as had his predecessors since 1856, he instead struck the door three times with the heel of his shoe, thereby preserving the plaster Rod.”⁹ There are two historical paradoxes here: first, even without the office or the instrument of Black Rod, the Parliament had been practicing the ritual of summoning and rejection; and second, even though an Usher of the Black Rod had been appointed, his symbolic instrument of office could not be used for its most famous act.¹⁰

Mr. Tierney kicking at the door is exactly the kind of improvisation that characterizes mythological tradition, especially in Lévi-Strauss’s reading, where the bricoleur fashions new ritual practices from what is at hand (or in this case, on foot), even if by doing so he seems to depart from tradition. The textual commentary here deepens and enhances this bricolage, transforming it into its own venerable century-old tradition: Black Rod “strode” to the door (there is no room for hesitancy in ritual performance), and when it was closed against him “struck” the door with his foot “as had his predecessors since 1856.” As we find with many rituals, there is no single or pure tradition for Victoria’s Black Rod. Original moments are layered over and over with subsequent variations in practice and meaning, whether motivated or contingent, while the language of reportage from within the ritual institution seeks to preserve the liveliness and immediacy of repeated actions.

The office of Black Rod is best known now for this commemorative ritual that carries the burden of substantive tension between the two Houses of Parliament (a tension that is a feature of Australian legislature and politics, since there is no guarantee that the government formed in the lower house will have a majority in the upper). Like many such offices in Commonwealth parliaments it has its origins in medieval court practice. In 1361 Walter Whitehors or Withors was granted 12d. per day to bear the Black Rod before the College of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor when the King was present. The Usher of the Black Rod soon became the principal Usher in England. His formal duties included carrying the rod of his office before the King and the college at Windsor, and on rare occasions he would be called on to tap the shoulder of any knight who was to be degraded or dismissed from the Order of the Garter. His principal function, however, was to “keep the doors” of the Chapter House o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Ritual Histories
• Part II. Ritual Practices
• Part III. Ritual Modernities
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments