The Essex Rebellion and the Bouteville Affair
The famous revolt of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, in 1601, has been
termed ‘the last honour revolt’ and interpreted as the swansong of chivalric
culture by Mervyn James.4 Essex himself was a famous soldier and a magnet
for the iron of chivalry in others. Even among the London crowd he was popular
as a paragon of chivalry, a reputation that was enhanced by cheap chivalric
romance in circulation. Some romantics expected him to lead a great
crusade. Chapman’s first instalment of Homer, that bible of honourable violence,
was dedicated to him. His body of supporters included many duellists
and showed in general a ‘strongly military orientation’, including as it did a
‘considerable representation of swordsmen with a taste for violence’. Through
Essex these men ‘made contact with the glamorous overtones of Tudor
monarchical chivalry in which the earl played a prominent part’.5
There were three great professions, Essex wrote: arms, law, and religion.
That he belonged proudly to the first in this list with all its ‘pains, dangers, and
difficulties’,6 makes him the ghostly heir of the mid-fourteenth-century writer
Geoffroi de Charny, as he was more obviously the ideological companion of
the contemporary poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney.
The solidarity of the Essex group, James argues, was based on honour, even
on honour as it had operated in the Middle Ages, with all the competition and
latent violence, thinly cloaked in elaborate courtesy, that such a code entails.
Since this culture of honour likewise ‘points to the importance of will and the
emphasis on moral autonomy’, it leads to ‘the uneasiness of the man of honour
in relation to authority, seen as liable to cabin, crib and confine this same
autonomy’.7
4 James, ‘At a Crossroads’. Cf. idem, ‘English Politics’, and McCoy, ‘ “A Dangerous Image” ’.
5 James, ‘At a Crossroads’, 428–9.
6 Ibid., 429. 7 James, ‘English Politics’, 314.
When his revolt failed miserably, Essex at first spoke the proud and defiant
language of this culture of honour. It was, as we have already seen, the language
of Ganelon in the Song of Roland, going back to the late eleventh or
twelfth century, the language of the knight Bertelay in The Story of Merlin,
from the thirteenth century.8 Essex justified his degree of autonomous action
in the honourable pursuit of a private feud; he noted that even natural law
allowed force to repel force, after all. He had done nothing against the queen
herself, or against God. He was merely ‘the law’s traitor, and would die for it’.9
Yet almost as soon as he was condemned, Essex abandoned the language
and culture of honour utterly, and all the way to the scaffold embraced a view
which Lacy Baldwin Smith found common to those defeated in attempts to
overthrow or severely constrain the Tudor monarchy: he adopted wholehearted
submission with a sense that his revolt had been judged and defeated
by the will of the Almighty.10 He thus became a late convert to what James
calls providentialist religion, a believer in the divine purpose that could be
effected as England achieved wholeness under its queen. Honour was hers to
distribute, not his to win in showy independence; even those as chivalrous and
great-hearted as he could not act as autonomous agents. His only success was
posthumous. Later writers portrayed Essex as almost saintly, a victim of the
pedantic snares of the law and of jealous enemies, a true chivalric and
Protestant hero in the service of his country.
James’s argument is powerful and fascinating. Even without entering into
all its implications, students of medieval chivalry may take the Essex revolt of
1601 as a significant signpost. It points away from ideas whose societal effects
we have studied; it points toward basic transformations of those ideas by the
early seventeenth century.
Our French incident, taking place a quarter of a century later, shows fascinating
similarities. The Bouteville affair of 1627 began with a duel and ended with
two French noblemen going to the scaffold.11 Not only did the Comte de
Bouteville and his cousin the Comte des Chapelles fight in violation of the royal
prohibition against duelling (a law on the books since 1602), they chose to
thumb their nose at such regulation by conducting their fight in the Place
Royale, the largest square in the capital and one with clear royalist associations.
This was the twenty-second duel the twenty-eight-year-old Bouteville had
fought in defence of his honour, but fighting in the Place Royale (rather than in
some remote alley or rural lane) showed a deliberate defiance of the laws.
300 Epilogue
8 Brault, ed., tr., Chanson de Roland, laisse 273; Pickens, tr., Story of Merlin, 339–41; Sommer,
ed., Vulgate Version, II, 310–13.
9 James, ‘At a Crossroads’, 455. 10 Smith, Treason.
11 Billacois, Le Duel, 247–75.
In the flood of argument and petition that reached Louis XIII and Cardinal
Richelieu on behalf of the young noblemen before their execution, the line of
defence taken by their fellow nobles is highly revealing. The two had done
nothing against the king or the state, these appeals stated. There had been no
fracture of the essential and honourable man-to-man bond uniting king and
nobleman. The two duellists had simply violated an edict (a distinction recalling
Essex’s claim that he was merely ‘the law’s traitor’, not a traitor to his sovereign).
Surely, their essential noble service as warriors ready for the king’s
service ought to count for more than breaking of such regulations. The effort
was unsuccessful. This time the pardon so frequently sought and so regularly
obtained was not forthcoming.
After their deaths the two men were highly praised by all (including the
royal administration, with one eye on their influential families and friends);
some even managed to portray them as ideal Christians undergoing a species
of martyrdom. During his trial des Chapelles had told his judges that he was
willing to shed his blood, if that sacrifice was necessary for the king to establish
his kingdom. Yet he added that he did know that ‘in antiquity [he means
the Middle Ages] men had fought and that kings of France had tolerated it up
to the present’.12
This trial and the somewhat mystified statement of the condemned des
Chapelles will remind us of a trial that took place in Paris three hundred years
earlier. In 1323 Jourdain de l’Isle Jourdain, lord of Casaubon, a notorious violator
of the peace, was finally brought to justice after he had killed two men
under royal safeguard and then murdered the unfortunate royal serjeant sent
to arrest him. On his way to the gallows (denied the nobler death by beheading
allowed the men of 1627), Jourdain confessed repeatedly that he deserved
death for his many misdeeds; but in each case he added, with a puzzlement like
that of des Chapelles, his quasi-defence based on old custom: ‘but it was in
war’. Though there was no movement to consider Jourdain anything like a
martyr, he carried cherished relics on his body as he went to his death, including
what he believed to be a piece of the true cross.13
12 ‘Ledit sieur dit que . . . si’l faut que le Roy establisse son royaume par le sang, il se sacrifie.
Mais qu’il est vrai que . . . dans l’antiquité on se battoit, et que cela a duré jusques à maintenant et
les Roys de France l’ont toleré’: ibid., 274–5.
13 Langlois and Lanhers, Confessions et jugements, 37–9, print the confession; cf. Cutler, Law of
Treason, 46, 144–5, and Kicklighter, ‘Nobility of English Gascony’. Kicklighter notes that his executioners
clad Jordain in a robe bearing the papal arms to mock the papal efforts for a pardon.