Photo: The honour of knighthoods has its roots in the aftermath of a bloody battle more than 900 years ago. (Reuters: Luke MacGregor )
It was William the Bastard who introduced the pompous idea of chivalry and titles. Have we found our modern-day imitation not in England, but in Canberra? Mungo MacCallum writes.
In using the idea of knighthoods as a grand distraction, the finely honed 11th century mind of Tony Abbott is simply following the lead given by the inventor of the concept, William of Normandy.
After invading Saxon England in 1066, William the Bastard, as he was known (an appellation some have also applied to his Australian imitator), needed something to do with his victorious army commanders, so he invented the concept of chivalry, which merely meant that those rich enough to own and maintain horses were entitled to be regarded as a kind of junior nobility. Not, of course, ranking with the big landowners, but in a class above the peasantry.
This was supposed to confer upon them responsibilities as well as rights, but of course it did not work out that way; untrammelled power seldom does. Most of those who failed to grab some land of their own became effectively men of the road - highwaymen above the law, who lived by rape and pillage, talents they brought to perfection during the crusades.
Magna Carta did more to legitimise the system than to control it. The "parfit gentil knight" somewhat ironically depicted by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, loyal to his king and dedicated to the ideal of courtly love (which in practice usually meant serial adultery), was the desired model, but it was seldom realised outside the Arthurian legends.
Over time the knights, like the rest of society, became gradually civilised since the title, unlike that of the real nobility, was not hereditary, and it could be, and was, bestowed at will to loyal followers of the king as a reward and bribe for services. Its advantage was that it gave the recipient kudos and precedence, standing him out from the mob. Its value was one of pure snobbery, and so it remains pretty much up to now in present-day England.
As the monarch's power declined, awarding honours became the plaything of the politicians, who unashamedly used them to solicit party funds. Labour governments affected to disapprove of the practice, but never seriously considered abandoning it. And inevitably, as England gained an empire, it spread to the colonies; English aristocrats were seen as natural leaders, both as administrators and also as military commanders, often with predictably disastrous results. In Australia, with few aberrations, the colonial and later state governors were drawn from their junior ranks for some half a century after Australia became nominally independent.
As the poet Hilaire Belloc put it in his evocation of one such, Lord Lundy:
We had intended you to be,
The next prime minister but three,
The stocks were sold, the press was squared,
The middle class was quite prepared.
But now ... imagination fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales.
And the idea caught on in the so-called classless society. Not only did Australian politicians gratefully accept knighthoods conferred by the mother country, with increasing independence they began to recommend their own supporters and followers for a similar honour - conferred by the palace, of course. Conservatives loved the idea; Labor premiers and prime ministers were more cautious, but they were not above using the system when it suited them.
Billy Hughes even insisted that an old political enemy, John Forrest, already a knight, should be elevated to the peerage as Lord Forrest of Bunbury in order to get him out of the country. Perhaps tragically, perhaps ironically, Forrest in fact died at sea on his way to Westminster to take his seat in the House of Lords. But generally Labor politicians eschewed imperial honours for themselves and their colleagues.
There was even an attempt to set up a particularly Australian peerage. In 1853 my own illustrious but eccentric ancestor William Charles Wentworth, who gloried in the name "The Native Son", put such a proposal to the New South Wales Legislative Council. It was laughed down by the radical Daniel Deniehy, who, after proposing that Wentworth's friend John Macarthur should be dubbed Earl of Camden with a rum keg emblazoned on a field of vert as his coat of arms, concluded that he found it was difficult to classify the mushroom order of nobility proposed by Wentworth.
"Perhaps it was only a specimen of the remarkable contrariety that existed at the antipodes. Here they all knew that the common water mole was transformed into the duck-billed platypus; and in some distant emulation of this degeneracy he supposed they were to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy," Deniehy suggested, to prolonged laughter and applause. This, of course, is the system that Abbott is accused of reviving.
In 1975 Gough Whitlam effectively dumped imperial honours in favour of the Order of Australia, and although Malcolm Fraser briefly revived knighthoods within the new order, Bob Hawke dumped them - it was thought forever. Even the ultra-monarchist conservative John Howard recognised them as an anachronism. But now, some 30 years later, they are to be restored in all their irrelevant pomposity.
And it provided Abbott not only with a distraction, but a useful wedge; one of the first recipients is to be the mother-in-law of the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, who has joined the general chorus of derision emanating not only from the left, but from some of Abbott's own team, who are not happy about having this latest brainstorm being inflicted on them without warning or debate. The retiring Governor-General Quentin Bryce, fresh from proclaiming her republican sympathies, is to become a dame, and her incoming successor Peter Cosgrove a knight. According to Abbott, the ennoblement is to go with the job from now on.
Previous G-Gs, along with all the other recipients of the Companionship of the Order of Australia, for a generation the country's highest honour, are thus effectively downgraded, as are all officers and members of the order. But hey, it's a great wedge. Abbott would probably not like to be reminded of it, but here again he is following the lead of a predecessor.
In 1976 Malcolm Fraser persuaded the Queensland Labor powerbroker Jack Egerton to accept a knighthood, causing ructions throughout the party. Its leader, Gough Whitlam, commented: "This is the most inappropriate conferral of the title since Queen Elizabeth I knighted Sir Toby Belch."
Shorten is unlikely to say anything as unkind about his mother-in-law. But Abbott must be hoping.
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.
The ignoble history of knighthoods - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
