Foreign News: 27 Garters

Every British schoolboy learns that in 1348 the Countess of Salisbury embarrassingly shed a garter on a crowded, royal ballroom floor. Courtiers tittered but gallant Edward III saved the situation by putting the thing on his left leg, proclaiming, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil be to him who evil thinks). Thus was inaugurated the Most Noble Order of the Garter, most exalted in the British Knighthood. It is one of two Orders which admit women.

Last week King George, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother Mary, and 24 other knights—youngest, the Duke of Norfolk; oldest, the Duke of Portland; newest, Earl Baldwin—assembled in the Waterloo Chamber of Windsor Castle. Each wore a mantle of dark blue velvet with a crimson hood, a black velvet hat with white ostrich plumes. The only members of the Order who did not wear a gold-encrusted dark-blue garter below the left knee were the two Queens. Instead they wore them on the left arm.

Solemnly the Most Noble Order of the Garter, headed by the King & Queen, shuffled into place, proceeded to St. George’s Chapel—the choir of which is the Garter Chapel—to worship together for the first time in 23 years, the second time in 129. Each knight filed into his own stall over which, during his lifetime, hang his sword, helmet, crest and banner.

Not all the stalls were filled. British absentees were the 87-year-old Duke of Connaught, great uncle of King George, who, too feeble to take part in the service, watched the procession from a car outside the Chapel; the Duke of Windsor, a Garter Knight of 26 years’ standing.* In a box high on the north wall of the Chapel, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, dressed in pink, gazed on the sea of blue, scarlet and gold beneath them, soon spotted their mother’s father the Earl of Strathmore. This was the first time in 600 years that a father and his daughter were attending a Garter Service.

The mellow voice of the Very Reverend Albert Victor Baillie, Dean of Windsor, Chaplain of the Order, led the knights through their service, brightened by the silvery piping of St. George’s choir. When it was over the worshippers moved to St. George’s Hall in the Castle. There they banqueted beneath the banners of the 26 original knights and the coats-of-arms of every knight in the Order since 1350. They noticed that two of the shields were blank—those of the Duke of Monmouth who rebelled against James II and the pro-Irish Duke of Ormonde who ran afoul of Charles II. The British press saluted the banquet as ”the most lavish State luncheon since pre-War days.”

*Shopping in Vienna this week, the Duke ordered stationery marked with his initials encircled by a garter and the Order’s mono.