‘HAIL! Noble ages of ancient chivalry!’, wrote C. Butler: ‘It is in your glorious annals, in the historic page, that we must seek for examples of pure and constant affection, for models of perfect virtue, since the age in which we live cannot, alas! supply them.’ The opening to The Age of Chivalry (1799) suggests a breakage or fall, the nature of which is indicated by the title page: the book is an adaption of Knights of the Swan by ‘Madame Genlis’. Genlis's book had contained what some regarded as a rather cruel portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette, a queen encouraged by ‘favourites’ ‘to hold the people in disdain’. Even when the queen's subjects act towards her with ‘generosity and sincerity,’ the ‘English’ Eadburga continues in folly and political intrigue, surrounding ‘herself with a crowd of people whose aversion to the revolution was notorious’. Although this queen is inevitably displaced from the throne, Genlis suggests that it would be a mistake to execute her: ‘were she to fall the victim of popular fury … the enemies of the revolution would make her a heroine’. Throughout this chivalric work, the rights of the people are canvassed. In contrast, The Age of Chivalry is, Butler assures readers, shorn of ‘exceptionable’ ‘political subjects’. Even if the present is corrupt, it is still possible to provide an education in the (un-revolutionary) spirit of chivalry.

For twenty years after Edmund Burke's Reflections the death of chivalry was a matter of constant remark. Yet its demise proved greatly exaggerated. The code had been injured by radical attempts to debunk it, maimed by depictions of economic suffering and damaged by critiques of union. Nonetheless, somehow readjusted, it could still serve a purpose. Cleansed of subject matter dangerous to the status quo, the idea of chivalry might allow ‘liberty’ to be recast in terms of the nation rather than considered in relation to the rights of the individual. But ‘chivalry’ was essentially aristocratic, fantastic and hard to pin down chronologically, always apparently past its zenith. Violent but heroic, it was hard to apply to a commercial nation or to the British nobility. Above all, it was connected with (Catholic) superstition.