THE VICTORIAN REVIVAL
Two centuries after jousting went out of fashion in Britain, the Eglinton tournament of 1839 once again saw knights in full armour thundering towards each other down the lists, hoping for a trophy that was to be awarded by the Queen of Beauty. The Victorian revival of chivalry had its roots in the Romantic rediscovery of all things medieval and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and it was ultimately co-opted into the service of Victorian morality.
Victoria and Albert were painted as Queen Philippa and Edward III; Disraeli would later call Victoria “the Faery”, in reference to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Baden-Powell urged his Boy Scouts to protect ladies, and a picture of Sir Galahad (preferred to Lancelot for his “purity”) hung in the chapel at Eton. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King pictured a repentant Guinevere prostrate at Arthur’s feet.
By contrast, the pre-Raphaelites seized on the Arthurian love triangle as a reflection of their own tangled love affairs. So too did the clever upper-class coterie known as the Souls. When Wilfred Scawen Blunt went to visit Lady Windsor, both dressed in white, they walked around a medieval castle discussing Lancelot and Guinevere.
The ideal of chivalry would be there, too, when men made way for women and children on the decks of the Titanic. And, poignantly, a soldier-knight kneeling before a lovely angel would be among the propaganda postcards produced for the First World War.