Prowess and Honour
In the first place, the essential linkage of violence with honour slipped. The
value of honour, of course, did not diminish. Who could doubt that belief in
honour continued in early modern European society, or that it drew strength
from its medieval predecessor? ‘The Renaissance cult of honour and fame’,
Malcolm Vale observes, ‘owed more than it was prepared to acknowledge to
the medieval cult of chivalry.’19 The argument here is, rather, that prowess was
no longer so regularly fused to this concept of honour, no longer the universally
praised personal means of attaining honour, edged weapons in hand.
State-formation played a key role in this change, probably aided by changes
in military technology. Stated in the baldest terms, the state finally achieved
the working monopoly of licit violence within the realm that had been its distant
goal for centuries—or at least it came to a new and undoubtedly
significant step on its movement towards that victory.20 Much larger armies,
equipped with siege trains of much larger cannon, figure prominently in most
analyses.21 Historian are, of course, wisely cautious about hurrying noblemen
off the stage too precipitously. As Malcolm Vale has noted, ‘the nobility in
England and on the Continent adapted themselves to changes dictated by new
18 The fourth key to chivalric strength (suggested in Chapter 10) was the role of chivalry in
establishing relationships between the genders. This Epilogue suggests basic changes in the view
taken of prowess and in its links with honour, piety, and status. The link between love and
prowess, too, must have altered in the post-medieval era; but it would be prudent to leave treatment
of such a topic for specialists in the history of gender relationships in early modern Europe.
19 Vale, War and Chivalry, 174.
20 The classic argument appears in Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 199–270. Even if current scholarship
opposes the general thesis of a crisis, and of royalist triumph, the evidence Stone mustered
in support of growing royal control of the means of violence seems significant. Bonney, Political
Change, 441, suggests that ‘[t]he nobles were defeated as a political force acting independently of
the crown and resorting to the sanction of armed rebellion’. In Rebels and Rulers, II, 221, Zagorin,
speaking of the princes and grands, argues that ‘if they still possessed substantial social and political
power over their inferiors, they had largely lost their ability and will to maintain armed resistance
against royal sovereignty’. Hale writes of the ‘civilizing’ and ‘demilitarizing’ of the ‘armoured
castes of western Europe: War and Society; Schalk suggests (to a medievalist, perhaps too starkly)
a move from a medieval view of nobility linked with the function of fighting to a view, by the late
sixteenth century, of nobility as pedigree: From Valor to Pedigree. James argues that the Tudor state
monopolized chivalric violence: ‘English Politics’.
21 For the military revolution and state formation in various countries, see Downing, The
Military Revolution. Black argues for the importance of the period after 1660 (i.e. beyond the usual
terminal date for the military revolution) and for the absolutist state as a cause of military change
rather than a consequence: A Military Revolution? On the role of military innovation, see Rogers,
‘Military Revolution’; Parker, The Military Revolution; Eltis, The Military Revolution.
techniques of war and military organization’.22 Even when belief in the key
role of heavy cavalry in warfare had succumbed to battlefield facts, the chivalrous
could still happily command units (even infantry units, supplied with
firearms) in the ever-larger national armies raised to fight the king’s wars. If
standing armies were coming into being on the continent from the midfifteenth
century, the crown continued to rely on militant nobles to raise soldiers,
put down internal rebellion, and act as military governors.23
Historians likewise recognize that the generous measure of state triumph in
warlike violence involves the way people thought as well as the way they
waged war. Beyond recruitment and supply, taxes, tactics, and technology, we
need to consider the altered self-definition of the nobles, their increasing
acceptance of a cluster of ideas about violence and honour.24 The Duc de
Trémoille in mid-seventeenth-century France copied into his letterbook a
description of the Duke of Parma, a famous captain of the previous generation;
he notes that the duke was engaged in ‘making war rather with his wits
and speeches than with the force of his arms’.25 The nobles were even coming
to see chivalry (whether vocation or status) as closely linked to the crown; it
meant service in what might almost be termed a ‘national chivalry’.26 This was
the lesson learned by the Earl of Essex, the Comtes de Bouteville and des
Chapelles, as we have seen, only at the very end of their lives. Honour need not
be acquired and defended by personal acts of violence; it comes from the sovereign
rather than from autonomous displays of prowess.
The very assumptions and actions of men like Bouteville and des Chapelles
may, however, seem to deny these changes. From roughly the mid-sixteenth
century a veritable cult of duelling stands as a remembrance of things past that
is all but immovable in the face of all other changes taking place. Tournament
was gone, or as near as mattered, and judicial combat was likewise on its way
into memory, but autonomous individuals could still remove any stain to
their sacred honour by spilling an opponent’s blood in the duel, the obvious
descendant of these forms. Duelling certainly demonstrates at least a partial
22 Vale, War and Chivalry, 162. Hale, War and Society, 94–5, similarly argues that ‘[i]t has been
suggested that the adoption of unchivalrous gunpowder weapons and the declining importance
of cavalry led to a decreasing appetite for military service among the aristocracies of Europe.
Neither assumption can be taken seriously.’ Hale likewise discounts ‘the case for the suggestion
that artillery was an instrument centralizing power’: p. 248.
23 Hale, War and Society, 247–8; Vale, War and Chivalry, 162–3.
24 Discussed in Vale, War and Chivalry, 100–74; Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, 132–72.
25 Quoted in Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, 57. Of course, many medieval captains used their
wits well, but the shift of emphasis away from prowess is fascinating. Some contemporary observers
noted the same phenomenon, but were on the other side. At Elizabeth’s court, the poet Samuel
Daniel regretted the lowered ‘virilitie’ of an age in which ‘more came to be effected by wit than by
the sword’ and decried ‘all-drowning Sov’raintie’. Quoted in McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 105, 118.
26 Keen, Nobility, Knighthood, 167–70.
continuance into the early modern era of the old chivalric theme of a defence
of honour through violence, and the old chivalric sense of political and even
ethical autonomy as well. This survival of the chivalric obsession with honour
and the perhaps even heightened assertion of personal independence seemed
to the participants not so much an illegal as an extra-legal practice, a statement
of their freedom from troublesome restraints in important matters of their
own choosing.27
Of course the institutional force of both Church and State formally opposed
the duel, and sometimes even took genuine steps to restrain it. The pattern will
look familiar to anyone who has studied the arguments and measures directed
at other troublesome chivalric practices, such as private war or the early tournament.
The sense of a genuine opposition of ideals is obvious, as is the caution
that the governors knew must accompany any clash with the deeply held
beliefs of those whose support was still essential to successful governance.
Royal legislation sometimes explicitly raised the issue of sovereignty and (as
we have seen) royal administrations sometimes insisted that spectacular violators
suffer the full punishment of the law; but the crown seldom pressed the
issue to its logical and rigorous conclusion. As François Billacois suggests concisely,
‘Duel is the supreme affirmation that aristocracy and monarchy are
essentially opposed associates in a coherent political system.’28
Yet we must recognize that duelling is not the same social practice as its
ancestor, private war. Perhaps the crown was all the more willing to look the
other way because duel involved only individuals in private combat; the days
of calling out a veritable army of armoured relatives and tenants and going to
war, pennants flying, had come down to a few men with pistols or rapiers in a
dark alley or a convenient field. Public order was, of course, still threatened in
theory, but was obviously less threatened in fact; the public stance of those in
charge could be maintained by growling and occasionally making examples of
spectacular offenders.
In fact, insistence on the right to duel may inversely illustrate the degree of
success the state was achieving in the separation of prowess and honour.
Duelling, from this point of view, represents a reaction to growing royal control
over violence on a grander scale. Such a view is finely illustrated in the
statement of a sixteenth-century French nobleman, appropriately named
Guillaume de Chevalier, that duelling had increased among his contemporaries
because nobles were doing less fighting on the battlefields as a result of
stronger monarchy.29
306 Epilogue
27 See in general Billacois, Le Duel; Kiernan, The Duel; Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree, 162–74.
28 Billacois, Le Duel, 391.
29 Quoted in Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree, 169–70. Cf. Vale, War and Chivalry, 165–7.