1 - Royal associations: heroic character and chivalric ceremony at the court of George III

Summary

On 23 April 1805, two years after the commencement of the Napoleonic wars, George iii reinvigorated the Order of the Garter at Windsor Castle with an event that presented medieval-style pageantry on a grand scale. The order dated back to the reign of Edward iii who established it in 1348, and whose son, the Black Prince, was one of the founder members. While the Garter had played a part in earlier monarchical ceremonies, George III's expansion of the fourteenth-century order represented something new: it was part of the king's larger reinvention of the monarchy. On this day in 1805 members of the order arrived at St George's Chapel through the king's newly commissioned Gothic entrance. A banquet was set up outside the castle with tables decorated with silver knights on horseback. More than 8,000 members of the public viewed this ticketed event. The link between the order and war was not lost on contemporaries. The author of An appendix to the Windsor Castle guide observed that ‘its revival, therefore, at a moment of danger, like the present, is not only requisite to the splendor which should adorn the Fountain of honour, but is an act of sound policy … to fan the flame of loyalty and patriotism which pervades every class of His Majesty's subjects’.

George's interest in the late Middle Ages has been underplayed by scholars more interested in the medievalism which boomed in the period after 1820. Yet his use of the fourteenth-century past played an integral role in fostering a vibrant eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century medievalism. These royal reinventions offered new visions of the medieval which worked alongside other ‘popular’ eighteenth-century expressions to create a shift towards more positive interpretations of this past and its revival. This chapter will examine George's interest in the late Middle Ages and how he imagined this period as a time of chivalry, heroic military victories, pomp and ceremony. In doing so, it will reveal George's two primary interests in the period: first, his fascination with Edward iii and the Black Prince as heroic characters who could be used to comment on royalty and virtue and, second, his focus on ‘medieval’ ceremonies to emphasise his majesty and power.