1

Memories of the Military Orders in Britain in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Rory MacLellan

Most studies of the modern memories of the crusades focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in Britain, a period in which the image of the military-religious orders was already well established as one of fierce soldiers, often mysterious and romantic, sometimes tragic or corrupt.¹ But when did these views of the medieval Templars, Hospitallers, and others first emerge? In omitting the early modern period, there is a risk of back-reading continuity into the middle memory of the orders. This chapter shall provide the first survey of how the military orders were remembered in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they first became the subject of historical study, focusing upon their depiction in four bestselling histories written in the period.

The Military Orders in Early Modern Britain

The military orders featured little in other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British sources. They do not appear in cartoons of the period, even those referencing Napoleon’s occupation of Malta, which he took from the Hospitallers in 1798.² Though the politician, general, and caricaturist George Townshend (1724–1807) sometimes signed himself ‘A Knight of Malta’, the order does not appear in his work.³ Apart from a few seventeenth-century pamphlets, it is only from the 1720s that news of the order’s activities begins to regularly appear in British newspapers.⁴ Besides the 1633 edition of Marlowe’s late sixteenth-century The Jew of Malta, the only other fiction touching upon the military orders and published in Britain before 1800 is the play The Knight of Malta, the poem The Lady of Brumpton, and Knight of Malta, and the novels The Knight of Malta: or, the Reward of Constancy and Heloise: or, the Siege of Rhodes.⁵ Each of these deals with the Hospitallers. There do not appear to be any fictional treatments of the other military orders in this period.

I shall begin these case studies with Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre, published in 1639. The first history of the crusades in English, Fuller’s work includes several chapters on the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights. By 1651, the book had already reached four editions.⁶ Next, I will discuss Elias Ashmole’s 1672 The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter which, despite its title, also includes one of the first attempts in English to provide a history of all the military orders, from the largest foundations to the smallest.⁷ The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists eight editions of this book between 1672 and 1726. Moving on to the eighteenth century, I look at David Hume’s The History of England, published in six volumes from 1754 to 1761, which provides brief accounts of the Templars and Hospitallers. His History had gone through over 100 editions and reprintings by the end of the following century.⁸ Finally, I examine the image of the military orders in Edward Gibbon’s six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1788. The ESTC records over 25 reprints or editions of some or all of these volumes from 1776 to 1797.

These four histories were readily accessible to a wide readership, as they were all written in English and had a less specialist focus than other available accounts of the military orders, such as the 1728 English translation of the Abbé de Vertot’s history of the Hospitallers.⁹ In a period when, unlike the nineteenth century, they had little or no presence in British literature and theatre, these histories are among the best sources of depictions of the military orders in early modern Britain.

Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre

Thomas Fuller (1607/1608–61) was a Cambridge cleric who advocated for political and religious moderation in the conflicts between crown, church, and parliament in the seventeenth century.¹⁰ His first book, The Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), focuses primarily on the crusades from 1095 to 1291, with a supplement detailing the later history of the military orders, the causes behind the failure of the Holy Land crusades and the kingdom of Jerusalem, and accounts of important crusaders and the involvement of each of Europe’s nations in the crusade movement.¹¹ He devotes several chapters to the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights.¹² He provides a broad history of each, even describing the very brief revival of the Hospitallers in England under Mary I, yet his account is often coloured by his anti-monasticism.¹³

Fuller initially presents the Hospitallers as a noble ideal, noting their role in protecting pilgrims, their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, their supposed neutrality in disputes between Christian rulers, and the order’s prohibitions on usury and duelling. But this does not last: ‘it is given to most religious orders, to be clear in the spring and mirie in the stream. These Hospitallers afterwards getting wealth, unlaced themselves from the strictnesse of their first Institution, and grew loose into all licentiousnesse’. He goes on to accuse the brethren of breaking their vows of poverty through the order’s vast wealth, of obedience by rebelling against their initial superior, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and of chastity by living ‘betwixt bawds and banquets’.¹⁴ He later recounts the Hospitallers’ conflict with Fulcher, patriarch of Jerusalem, including attacking the church of the Holy Sepulchre and bribing the college of cardinals to rule against Fulcher when he complained to them about the order.¹⁵

His account of the Templars also begins by presenting them as being born out of high ideals but falling into corruption as their wealth and power increased:

From Alms-men they turned Lords; and though very valiant at first (for they were sworn rather to die then to flie) afterwards lazinesse withered their arms, and swelled their bellies. They laughed at the rules of their first Institution, as at the swaddling-clothes of their infancie.¹⁶

Fuller depicts the order as attempting to trick St Louis into making peace with Egypt for their own ends, but also wisely counselling Robert of Artois against his attack on Mansoura in the Fifth Crusade which ended in a disaster for the crusaders.¹⁷ Despite his criticisms of the Templars’ supposed corruption, Fuller condemns Clement V and Philip IV’s actions in bringing about the end of the order: ‘the Templars, by the cruel deed of Pope Clement the fifth, and foul fact of Philip the Fair King of France, were finally exstirpated out of all Christendome’.¹⁸ He goes on to present both arguments for and against the guilt of the Templars on the charges of heresy that they faced, concluding ‘let us suspend our censure till the day of judgement; and then and no sooner shall we certainly be informed therein’.¹⁹ Despite this, he does list ‘the Treacherie of the Templars’ as one of the eight factors that hindered the crusades.²⁰ He also complains about the Pope exempting a supposed ‘six and twentie thousand manours in Europe, belonging to the Templars and Hospitallers, from paying any tithes to the Priest of the parish; so that many a minister in England smarteth at this day for the Holy warre’. This exemption from tithes was ‘sacriledge’ as it took away ‘the dowrie of the Church without assuring her any joynture in lieu of it’.²¹ Here we may see Fuller’s personal concerns shining through, being a minister reliant on tithes himself.

Fuller is wholly positive in his account of the Teutonic Knights, ‘who behaved themselves right valiantly clean through the Holy Warre’ and ‘cannot be touched either for treason or faction’.²² He praises the order’s history in the Baltic, where they responsible for founding many cities and their former lands of Prussia and Livonia ‘are now become the rich fringe of Europe’. The order ‘in Prussia did knight-service against the Tartarians, and were Christendomes best bank against the inundations of those barbarous people’.²³ This shift to operating in Europe rather than the Holy Land is something Fuller also approves of in the Hospitallers, in marked contrast to his condemnation of their history in the Levant:

to the terrour of the Turks, comfort of the Christians, and their own immortall fame, they maintained this Island [Rhodes], and secured the seas for the passage of Pilgrimes to Jerusalem: till at last in the yeare 1523, after six moneths siege they surrendred the citie to their own honour, and shame of other Christians who sent them no succour.²⁴

He is also positive about their defence of Malta against the Turks:

here the Hospitallers seated themselves, and are the bulwark of Christendome to this day, giving dayly evident proof of their courage. But their master-piece was in the yeare 1565, when they couragiously defended the citie of Malta besieged by Soliman.²⁵

In contrast, Fuller condemns the Templars for not continuing to fight as the Hospitallers and Teutonic Order did after 1291. While he disliked the wealth of both these orders

they busied themselves in defending of Christendome, maintaining the Island of Rhodes against the Turks, as the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian; the world therefore never grudged them great wages who did good work. These were accounted necessarie members of Christendome, the Templars esteemed but a superfluous wenne; they lay at rack and manger and did nothing.²⁶

In his shift from criticism to praise for the Hospitallers once they began to fight the Turks from Rhodes, we can see Fuller reflecting a wider concern in England about the power of the Ottoman Empire, which was also the subject of his book’s final chapter.²⁷ Fear of the Ottoman advance can be seen in how the Hospitallers’ victory over them in the siege of Malta in 1565 was celebrated even in Protestant England.²⁸ In 1571, the defeat of the Turks by a Catholic force at Lepanto was greeted with a sermon of thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral.²⁹ Richard Knolle’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), the first English history of the Turks, also ends with a chapter on the contemporary Ottoman Empire, discussing the military strength of the Turks and what can be done to defeat them, much in the manner of a medieval recovery treatise.³⁰ Fuller also had personal reasons to be sympathetic to the Hospitallers combating the Turks and their allies in the Mediterranean. Serving then as a vicar in Dorset, Fuller would have been well aware of contemporary raids upon the West Country by the Barbary Corsairs.³¹

Readers of Fuller’s history would come away with a mixed view of the military orders: ‘some pietie, more loosenesse and lazinesse’, as he described the membership of religious orders.³² But he also thought that these supposedly corrupt and lazy institutions could be redeemed if they continued to fight to defend ‘Christendom’ after 1291, as the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights did. Otherwise, they would become increasingly idle and be suppressed like the Templars.

Ashmole’s Order of the Garter

Though Fuller does address the three major orders, he does not discuss the many more minor ones such as the order of St Lazarus, or regional orders like the Knights of Santiago. These and many others are included in Elias Ashmole’s The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672). An antiquarian, astrologer, alchemist, and founder of the Ashmolean Museum, Ashmole also had a great interest in heraldry and was Windsor Herald from 1660 to 1675. He was particularly enthused by the Order of the Garter, which he first began studying late in the Interregnum (1649–60). An ardent royalist, his interest may have in part been motivated as an act of resistance against the Protectorate, as well as the order’s royal nature.³³

The first three chapters of Ashmole’s book deal with knighthood, its history and characteristics, and with other knightly orders besides the Order of the Garter. Chapter 2 addresses the military-religious orders, defining them and the motives behind their foundation, and giving very brief histories of each military order.³⁴ Ashmole claims that both military-religious orders (which he calls religious or ecclesiastical orders) and chivalric orders (which he refers to as military orders) were founded for three main purposes. First, out of ‘perfect and sincere love to Honor’, the ‘continual advancement of Military Affairs’, and to reward, ‘excite and promote Virtue’. Second:

to repel the violence and cruelty [of non-Christians], to vindicate the oppressed, redeem the injured and enslaved, to give entertainment and relief to Pilgrims and Strangers, were part of the Duties to which the Knights Hospitallers, Templers, and those of Saint Iames in Gallicia, stood engaged by their first foundation.

A third reason was to fight in defence of the Christian Faith, against Pagans and Infidels, to propagate the Christian Territories, and to promote the service of the Catholick Church; which was the chief cause why the Orders last mentioned were instituted, as also those other of the Holy Sepulchre, Calatrava, Alcantara, St. Saviour of Mount Royal, our Lady of Montesa, of Christ in Portugal, and the Sword-Bearers in Livonia.³⁵

Following this are brief individual histories of 46 different military-religious orders. Each typically notes the origins of the order, their purpose, rule, dress, and their fate, if dissolved, or current whereabouts, if still active. Ashmole often elides different institutions or creates entirely new ones that never existed. For example, one of the orders he describes are the Brician Knights, a Swedish military order dedicated to St Birgitta of Sweden.³⁶ His account is largely reproduced from that of Joseph Micheli y Marquez’s 1642 Tesoro Militar de Cavalleria, another volume on the military-religious and chivalric orders.³⁷ Ashmole cites as his source a ‘Marcus. Ant. Vianus’ mentioned in Micheli y Marquez’s book. But both he and Micheli y Marquez’s other source for the Brician Knights, a Brother Antonius Bosius, either never existed or have since been lost and are unattested elsewhere. Though St Birgitta did write on the subject of knighthood, there is no medieval evidence of a military order dedicated to her.³⁸ An 1864 study of the Swedish peerage did record three knights of St Birgitta from just one family, the Ulfsparres, but later historians found that the entire medieval history of this family was fabricated.³⁹ Of the 46 orders listed by Ashmole, 21 either never existed, were proposed but never founded, or were not military orders at all but rather secular chivalric or non-military-religious orders.⁴⁰ Despite these inaccuracies, his account is the first comprehensive survey in English of each of the military orders, and remained the only one until F.C. Woodhouse’s volume on the orders in 1879.⁴¹

Throughout these histories, Ashmole presents an almost uniformly positive view of the military orders. Only the Templars and Hospitallers come in for criticism, again due to a supposed corruption caused by their wealth:

But when Riches increast, and their Revenues were augmented, they [the Templars] grew proud, and withdrew themselves from the obedience of the Patriarch of Ierusalem, to join with the Pope.⁴²

Of the Hospitallers, he writes that ‘when their Revenues increased, it begat a neglect of their former religious and humble carriage; and forthwith they laboured with the Pope to be absolved from their obedience to the Patriarch’. The patriarch and several other bishops then went to Rome to ‘manifest the injuries they sustained from the Knights’.⁴³ This focus on both orders breaking their obedience to the patriarch builds upon Fuller’s account of the Hospitallers’ break with the patriarch by adding an anti-Papal undertone. Both orders’ arrogance and greed is set alongside their preference for papal authority over patriarchal.

Despite these critiques, Ashmole agrees with Fuller that there was no basis to the crimes the Templars were accused of, instead saying that many ‘sober men’ judge ‘that their Wealth was their greatest crime’. Unlike this earlier author, who accuses the Templars and Hospitallers of hindering the crusades with their infighting, Ashmole commends both orders for their defence of the kingdom of Jerusalem:

These Knights, with those other of the Holy Sepulchre, Hospitallers, and Teutonicks, were the principal Columns which supported the Kingdom of Ierusalem, for a long time; and therefore their valiant encounters with the Infidels, and forwardness to sacrifice their lives, for the honor of God, and defence of the Holy Land, ought to be had in everlasting remembrance.⁴⁴

He goes on to applaud the Hospitallers who had ‘constantly hazarded their lives in the defence of the Christian Faith’ and defended Rhodes from the Turks ‘with exceeding great charge, and signal valor’.⁴⁵ On Malta, the Hospitallers ‘yet continue the Bulwark and Fortress of Europe’.⁴⁶

Of Philip de Mézières’ proposed but never founded Order of the Passion, Ashmole notes the ‘nobleness and largeness of the design’.⁴⁷ Ashmole also praises the Mercedarians, which he mistakenly identifies as a military order, for their role ransoming captives.⁴⁸ This was ‘charitable and pious work’, which the order continued to carry out ‘with all religious care and faithfulness’ since their foundation.⁴⁹

On the other more minor orders, Ashmole is very matter of fact and provides little opinion or analysis of them, often being more concerned with their heraldry and dress than their activities, understandably, considering that Ashmole was a herald. For example, the entry for the probably fictitious Knights of St Blaise reads:

These were called also Knights de Sancta Maria, and founded under the Rule of St. Basil. They were Officers and Servants to the Kings of Armenia, and had assigned them for their Habit Skie-colour, with a Cross gold, worn before their breasts. Others say a Red Cross, and in the middle thereof the Picture of St. Blase their Patron.

This Order was at the height, when the Armenian Kings, of the House of Luzignam, kept their Court in the City of Acon.⁵⁰

Hume’s History of England

David Hume (1711–76), philosopher and historian, began his History of England (published 1754–61) as The History of Great Britain, Volume I, which dealt with the reigns of James I and Charles I.⁵¹ The second volume covered the period from Charles’ death through to 1688. It was only with the next two volumes, on the Tudors, that the series became The History of England. The final two volumes dealt with the invasion of Julius Caesar through to the reign of Henry VII. Though focused on English history, the series does take in more international topics such as the crusades and the military orders. His account of the crusades has been derided as ‘hack work’ but his brief depiction of the Templars and Hospitallers demonstrate interesting developments upon those of Fuller and Ashmole.⁵² Like Fuller, Hume presents the Templars as being a noble ideal (‘uniting the two qualities most popular of that age, devotion and valour’) but sliding into laziness as their wealth increased:

Their great riches, joined to the course of time, had, by degrees, relaxed the severity of these virtues […] they rather chose to enjoy in ease their opulent revenues in Europe […] and passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting, gallantry, and the pleasures of the table.⁵³

Despite these supposed flaws, Hume claims that there was no basis to the accusations made against the Templars at their trial.⁵⁴ This account of the Templars follows the same lines as Fuller and Ashmole, but Hume differs from both of these earlier authors when it comes to the Hospitallers. Rather than claiming that the order was corrupted by its wealth and fell into the same laziness and corruption as the Templars, Hume instead says that the Hospitallers were not wealthy at all: ‘poverty had as yet preserved them from like corruptions’. The brethren of the order ‘still distinguished themselves by their enterprizes against the infidels’.⁵⁵

Like these earlier writers, he praises the Hospitallers’ role in fighting non-Christians, though he includes their tenure in the Holy Land in this, a period of the order’s history which Fuller derided. When describing the suppression of the order in England, Wales, and Ireland by Henry VIII in 1540, Hume writes that the Hospitallers had ‘by their valour, done great service to Christendom; and had very much retarded, at Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta, the rapid progress of the barbarians’.⁵⁶ Hume’s wholly positive view of the Hospitallers, compared to Fuller’s more measured one, may in part be because Hume, not being a priest himself, was less concerned than Fuller at the order’s exemption from tithes.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall

Edward Gibbon (1737–94), who corresponded with Hume and viewed the philosopher as a mentor, touched upon the military orders in his own historical writings.⁵⁷ His The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) begins in AD 98 with the reign of Trajan but goes through to the sixteenth century and so takes in both the crusades and the military orders. In Gibbon’s depiction of the orders, we find a return to the view of Fuller and Ashmole that the Templars and Hospitallers were a noble ideal:

But the firmest bulwark of Jerusalem was founded on the knights of the Hospital of St. John, and of the temple of Solomon; on the strange association of a monastic and military life, which fanaticism might suggest, but which policy must approve. The flower of the nobility of Europe aspired to wear the cross, and to profess the vows, of these respectable orders; their spirit and discipline were immortal.⁵⁸

His approval of this combination of monastic and military stands in stark contrast to the disdain he displayed elsewhere for monasticism. In late imperial Rome ‘the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister […] and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity’.⁵⁹ Yet here, the active vocation of the military orders combined with ‘useless’ monasticism created an institution of ‘spirit and discipline’.

Like our previous authors, Gibbon goes on to write that the Templars were corrupted by their wealth, as were (and here he disagrees with Hume) the Hospitallers:

The austerity of the convent soon evaporated in the exercise of arms; the world was scandalized by the pride, avarice, and corruption of these Christian soldiers; their claims of immunity and jurisdiction disturbed the harmony of the church and state; and the public peace was endangered by their jealous emulation.⁶⁰

Despite the supposed flaws of these orders, Gibbon writes that even ‘in their most dissolute period’ the Templars and Hospitallers ‘maintained their fearless and fanatic character’ and the ‘spirit of chivalry’ lived on in Hospitaller Malta.⁶¹ Like Fuller, Ashmole, and Hume, Gibbon is full of praise for the Hospitallers’ defence of Rhodes:

under the discipline of the order, that island emerged into fame and opulence; the noble and warlike monks were renowned by land and sea: and the bulwark of Christendom provoked, and repelled, the arms of the Turks and Saracens.⁶²

Of their tenure on Malta, he writes:

Crete, or Candia, with Cyprus, and most of the smaller islands of Greece and Asia, have been subdued by the Turkish arms, whilst the little rock of Malta defies their power, and has emerged, under the government of its military Order, into fame and opulence.⁶³

Again, the military orders, though previously lazy, arrogant, or corrupt, could redeem themselves by continuing to fight the Turks.

Conclusion

We can see a great deal of continuity here in the middle memory of the military orders. These knights were still portrayed as romantic but often corrupt warriors, much as nineteenth-century literature did, though perhaps with a greater emphasis on combating the Turks, spurred on by contemporary concerns about the Ottoman Empire.⁶⁴ For each of these four authors, even the strongly anti-Catholic Gibbon, the military orders arose out of noble ideals, yet ones that they struggled to live up to. For all four authors, the Templars were a cautionary example of what wealth and pride could do to an institution. While the Hospitallers sometimes fell into the same flaws, they were always redeemed by their defence of Rhodes and Malta. When the Teutonic Knights were mentioned, they were presented wholly positively, particularly their campaigns in the Baltic. In this praise of military orders ‘defending Christendom’, we can see the authors emulating contemporary concerns about the power of the Ottoman Empire, while their criticism of the orders, and of the Templars and Hospitallers’ break from patriarchal authority in favour of the Pope, demonstrates their anti-Catholicism.

An interesting absence in these histories is any depiction of the Templars as the guardians of secret treasure or gnostic knowledge, practising magic or devil worship, surviving as Freemasons, or indeed any other stories of Templar survival, all major features of popular views of the order today. In fact, Fuller sometimes overstates the destruction of military orders, claiming that the Teutonic Knights were abolished in 1525, rather than only losing their Prussian territories and grandmaster.⁶⁵ Each of these four authors sees the Templars, though flawed, as largely innocent of the charges they faced.⁶⁶ While Ashmole was an early Freemason, he made no attempt to link his organisation with the Templars, such a connection, widespread today, was not invented until the mid-eighteenth century.⁶⁷ Though there were Templar lodges in England by 1778, the link does not seem to have made it into the mainstream of British historical consciousness until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the following chapter shall show.⁶⁸

Notes

1. The two main monographs on crusader medievalism both focus on this period and region: Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Aldershot, 2000); Mike Horswell, The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c. 1825–1945 (Abingdon, 2018). See also Elizabeth Siberry, ‘Victorian Perceptions of the Military Orders’, in Malcolm Barber (ed.), The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick (London, 1994), pp. 365–72; Adam Knobler, ‘Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:2 (April 2006), pp. 293–325; Mike Horswell and Jonathan Phillips (eds.), Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Crusades, Volume One (Abingdon, 2018); Elizabeth Siberry, Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Six(Abingdon, 2021).
2. For example, the November 1799 cartoon Buonaparte’s Dance of Death depicts Napoleon being ‘Stabb’d at Malta!’ by a figure in a green and yellow uniform with the papakha hat of a Cossack, rather than the red and white uniforms of the eighteenth-century Hospitallers: London, The British Museum, 1948,0214.648. This is unlikely to be a reference to the order’s co-option by Paul I of Russia, who had himself elected grand master on 7 November 1798 as the cartoon’s depiction of Egyptian and ‘Tripoline’ figures is equally inaccurate: H.J.A. Sire, The Knights of Malta (London, 1994), pp. 243–45. More likely, the cartoonist was using this imagery as a shorthand to convey a foreign nature, rather than accuracy.
3. Charles Press, ‘The Georgian Political Print and Democratic Institutions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19:2 (April 1977), p.223.
4. For example, Nevves from Babylon (London, 1637); Nevves from the Great Turke (London, 1645); ‘Foreign Affairs’, Ipswich Journal, 24 December 1720, p. 1; ‘Milan, June 30’, Newcastle Courant, 21 July 1722, p. 5; ‘Paris, January 16’, Stamford Mercury, 17 January 1723, p. 23.
5. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London, 1647); The Lady of Brumpton, and Knight of Malta (London, 1721); The Knight of Malta: or, the Reward of Constancy (London, 1724); George Monck Berkeley, Heloise: or, the Siege of Rhodes, two vols (London, 1788).
6. Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester, 2011), p. 62.
7. The first account in English was a translation of André Favyn’s Le Theatre d’Honneur et de Chevalerie in 1623, which also catalogued the military and chivalric orders. However, it does not appear to have sold well as it was not reprinted and no further editions were produced: André Favyn, The Theater of Honour and Knight-hood (London, 1623).
8. James Fieser, ‘Editorial Introduction’, in James Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume Volume Seven: Early Responses to Hume’s History of England (Bristol, 2002),p. xxi.
9. René Aubert, abbé de Vertot, The History of the Knights of Malta, two vols(London, 1728).
10. W.B. Patterson, ‘Fuller, Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press,2004), online ed., January 2008, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10236 [accessed 15 July 2021].
11. For an overview of Fuller’s place in crusade historiography, see Tyerman, Debate on the Crusades, pp. 60–64. For studies of his Holy Warre as a whole, rather than his depiction of the military orders specifically, see Bernard Hamilton, ‘An Anglican View of the Crusades: Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre’, in Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), The Church on Its Past (Studies in Church History, Vol. 49) (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 121–31, and W.B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past (Oxford, 2018), pp. 42–77.
12. Thomas Fuller, The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge, 1639), pp. 47–49, 65–66, 75–76, 189–90, 193–94, 229–42, 257–58.
13. Thomas Fuller, The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge, 1639), pp.241–42.
14. Ibid., p. 48. Fuller is not being entirely unfair in condemning the order for failing to adhere to these ideals, at least when it comes to duelling and neutrality in secular disputes. The Hospitallers on Malta had a strong duelling culture, while the order’s officials in Europe sometimes fought in wars between Christian rulers: Emanuel Buttigieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580-c.1700 (London, 2011), pp. 161–65; Helen J. Nicholson, ‘Holy Warriors, Worldly War: Military Religious Orders and Secular Conflict’, Journal of Medieval Military History, xvii (2019), pp. 61–79.
15. Fuller, Historie of the Holy Warre, pp. 75–76.
16. Ibid., p. 66.
17. Ibid., pp. 188–90, 193–95.
18. Ibid., p. 229.
19. Ibid., p. 234.
20. Ibid., p. 257.
21. Ibid., p. 258.
22. Ibid., pp. 234–35.
23. Ibid., p. 235.
24. Ibid., p. 236.
25. Ibid., p. 237.
26. Ibid., p. 233.
27. Ibid., pp. 282–86.
28. A Fourme to Be Used in Common Prayer Every Wednesdaye and Fryday, within the Cittie and Dioces of London: For the Delivery of Those Christians, That Are Now Invaded by the Turk (London, 1565); A Shortforme of Thanksgeving for the Deliverie of the Isle of Malta from the Turkes. Set Forth by Matthew Archebyshop of Canterburye (London, 1565).
29. Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades (London, 1988),p. 349.
30. Richard Knolle, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603). For recovery treatises, see Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000).
31. Hamilton, ‘An Anglican View’, p. 130.
32. Fuller, Historie of the Holy War, p. 242.
33. Michael Hunter, ‘Ashmole, Elias’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press,2004), online ed., May 2006, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/764 [accessed 14 April 2021].
34. Elias Ashmole, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672), pp. 48–94.
35. Ibid., p. 48.
36. Ibid., p. 83.
37. Joseph Micheli y Márquez, Tesoro Militar de Cavallaria (Madrid, 1642), ff. 57r-v.
38. St Birgitta’s description of a dubbing ceremony for knights in her Revelationes could be interpreted as demonstrating that she contemplated forming a military order: Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden Volume I: Liber Caelestis, eds. Denis Searby and Bridget Morris, i (Oxford, 2006), pp. 206–208. However, this has been interpreted as at best a call for a lay fraternity of knights, not a religious one: Emilia Żochowska, ‘The Christian Kingdom as an Image of the Heavenly Kingdom according to St. Birgitta of Sweden’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Southern Denmark, 2010), p. 197.
39. Hans Cnattingius, ‘The Order of the Knights of St. Bridget’, Annales Academiae Regiae Scientiarum Upsaliensis, 11 (1967), pp. 10–12, 25.
40. In addition to the order of St Birgitta, these are the orders of the Holy Sepulchre, of St John of Acre (likely an early modern chivalric creation), of St Blaise, of SS Cosmas and Damian, of St Katherine of Sinai, of St Anthony in Ethiopia, the Constantinian Order of St George (an early modern chivalric order), the order of St Saviour in Aragon (perhaps a confusion with the Bridgettines), of the Wing of St Michael (an early modern chivalric order), of St Gereon, of the Holy Ghost in Rome (a religious order), of St Mary of Mercy (the Mercedarians, a religious order), of the Rosary, of the Passion of Jesus Christ (proposed but never founded), of the Holy Ghost again, of St George in Rome, of St Paul, of Pios/of the Golden Spur (a papal chivalric order), of Loretto (perhaps confused with the Loretto Sisters), of the Christian Militia (existed more in theory than reality). The Knights of the Holy Sepulchre do exist today as a chivalric order of the Catholic Church, but there is no contemporary evidence of a medieval military order by that name. Ashmole probably confused them with the genuine Canons of the Holy Sepulchre, who were non-military.
41. F.C. Woodhouse, The Military Religious Orders of the Middle Ages: The Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Others (London, 1879).
42. Ashmole, Institution, Laws and Ceremonies, p. 55.
43. Ibid., p. 51.
44. Ibid., p. 56.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., p. 54.
47. Ibid., p. 83.
48. The claim that the Mercedarians were a military order originated in the sixteenth century. They actually originated as a lay confraternity which later became a religious order: James Brodman, ‘The Origins of the Mercedarian Order: A Reassessment’, Studia Monastica, 19 (1977), pp. 353–60.
49. Ashmole, Institution, Laws and Ceremonies, p. 79.
50. Ibid., p. 61.
51. For a biography of Hume, see Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford, rev. ed., 1980).
52. Tyerman, Debate on the Crusades, p. 81.
53. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, eight vols(London, rev. ed., 1773), ii, pp. 361–62.
54. Ibid., ii, pp. 362–64.
55. Ibid., ii, p. 362.
56. Ibid., iv, p. 205.
57. John Gawthrop, ‘A History of Edward Gibbon’s Six Autobiographical Manuscripts’, British Library Journal, 25 (1999), p. 194.
58. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six vols (London, 1776–88), vi, p. 65.
59. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, iii, pp. 632–33. I would like to thank Dr Colin Haydon for this point.
60. Ibid., vi, pp. 65–66.
61. Ibid., vi, p. 66.
62. Ibid., vi, pp. 314–15.
63. Ibid., i, p. 27.
64. Siberry, ‘Victorian Perceptions’, 369–72.
65. Fuller, Historie of the Holy Warre, p. 236. Ashmole correctly notes their continued survival in Germany: Ashmole, Institution, Laws and Ceremonies, p. 59.
66. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France also saw a growing reassessment of the order’s guilt: Philippe Josserand, ‘The Templar Order in Public and Cultural Debate in France during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Helen J. Nicholson and Jochen Burgtorf (eds.), The Templars, the Hospitallers and the Crusades: Essays in Homage to Alan J. Forey (Abingdon, 2020), pp. 145–46.
67. For the creation of the Templar-Freemason link, see Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth (Rochester, VT, rev. ed., 1990), pp. 110–24 and Josserand ‘The Templar Order’, pp. 146–47.
68. Ibid., p. 116.

Bibliography

Primary

1. A Fourme to Be Used in Common Prayer Every Wednesdaye and Fryday, within the Cittie and Dioces of London: For the Delivery of those Christians, that Are Now Invaded by the Turk. London, 1565.
2. A Shortforme of Thanksgeving for the Deliverie of the Isle of Malta from the Turkes. Set Forth by Matthew Archebyshop of Canterburye. London: William Seres, 1565.
3. Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. London: Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647.
4. Berkeley, George Monck. Heloise: Or, The Siege of Rhodes. two vols, London: J. Forbes, C. Elliot, T. Kay, P. McQueen, T. and J. Egerton, Shepperdston and Reynold, C. Stalker, 1788.
5. Ipswich Journal, 24 December 1720.
6. London, The British Museum. 1948,0214.648.
7. Nevves from Babylon. London: T. Harper, 1637.
8. Nevves from the Great Turke. London: Jo. Handcock, 1645.
9. Newcastle Courant, 21 July 1722.
10. The Knight of Malta: or, the Reward of Constancy. London: T. Corbett, 1724.
11. The Lady of Brumpton, and Knight of Malta. London: J. Roberts, 1721.
12. Stamford Mercury, 17 January 1723.

Secondary

1. Ashmole, Elias. The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. London: J. Macock, 1672.
2. Aubert, René, abbé de Vertot. The History of the Knights of Malta. two vols. London: G. Strahan, 1728.
3. Barber, Malcolm (ed.). The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick. London: Ashgate, 1994.
4. Birgitta of Sweden. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden Volume I: Liber Caelestis. eds. Denis Searby and Bridget Morris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
5. Brodman, James. ‘The Origins of the Mercedarian Order: A Reassessment’. Studia Monastica, 19 (1977), pp. 353–60.
6. Buttigieg, Emanuel. Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580-c.1700. London: Continuum, 2011.
7. Clarke, Peter D. and Charlotte Methuen (eds.). The Church on Its Past (Studies in Church History, Vol. 49). Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013.
8. Cnattingius, Hans. ‘The Order of the Knights of St. Bridget’. Annales Academiae Regiae Scientiarum Upsaliensis, 11 (1967), pp. 5–35.
9. Favyn, André. The Theater of Honour and Knight-hood. London: William Iaggard, 1623.
10. Fieser, James (ed.). Early Responses to Hume Volume Seven: Early Responses to Hume’s History of England. Bristol: Bloomsbury, 2002.
11. Fuller, Thomas. The Historie of the Holy Warre. Cambridge: Thomas Buck, 1639.
12. Gawthrop, John. ‘A History of Edward Gibbon’s Six Autobiographical Manuscripts’. British Library Journal, 25 (1999), pp. 188–203.
13. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. six vols. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776–88.
14. Horswell, Mike. The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c. 1825–1945. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
15. Horswell, Mike and Jonathan Phillips (eds.). Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Crusades, Volume One. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
16. Hume, David. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. eight vols. London: T. Cadell, rev. ed., 1773.
17. Hunter, Michael. ‘Ashmole, Elias’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). online ed., May 2006, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/764 [accessed 14 April 2021].
18. Knobler, Adam. ‘Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:2 (April 2006), pp. 293–325.
19. Knolle, Richard. The Generall Historie of the Turkes. London: Adam Islip, 1603.
20. Leopold, Antony. How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
21. Micheli y Márquez, Joseph. Tesoro Militar de Cavallaria. Madrid: Moreno Gargallo, 1642.
22. Mossner, Ernest C. The Life of David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. ed., 1980.
23. Nicholson, Helen J. ‘Holy Warriors, Worldly War: Military Religious Orders and Secular Conflict’. Journal of Medieval Military History, xvii (2019), pp. 61–79.
24. Nicholson, Helen J. and Jochen Burgtorf (eds.). The Templars, the Hospitallers and the Crusades: Essays in Homage to Alan J. Forey. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
25. Partner, Peter. The Knights Templar and their Myth. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, rev. ed., 1990.
26. Patterson, W.B. ‘Fuller, Thomas’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). online ed., January 2008, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10236 [accessed 15 July 2021].
27. ———. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
28. Press, Charles. ‘The Georgian Political Print and Democratic Institutions’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19:2 (April 1977), pp. 216–38.
29. Siberry, Elizabeth. The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
30. ———. Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Six. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.
31. Sire, H.J.A. The Knights of Malta. London: Yale University Press, 1994.
32. Tyerman, Christopher. England and the Crusades. London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
33. ———. The Debate on the Crusades. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
34. Woodhouse, F.C. The Military Religious Orders of the Middle Ages: The Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Others. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1879.
35. Żochowska, Emilia. ‘The Christian Kingdom as an Image of the Heavenly Kingdom according to St. Birgitta of Sweden’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Southern Denmark, 2010).