AND ANOTHER THING
Wiping bums with the help of 16 quarterings of nobility
PAUL JOHNSON
By now you ought to have guessed. No? Well, he is called His Eminent Highness the Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Fra Andrew Bertie (pro- nounced Barty). Strictly speaking, he ranks as a reigning prince, and is treated as such by the 50-odd governments with which the Grand Magistry in Rome has diplomatic relations. The order goes back to the very early 12th century and is thus older than most of the royal houses, indeed nations, of Europe, and Fra Bertie, born in 1929, is the 78th Grand Master in unbroken succession. But he is the first to be an Englishman, though Englishmen have served with the knights since the beginning. By all accounts, however, he is an exemplary Grand Master, who has overseen important improvements in the fortunes of the order in the last few years.
Since Bonaparte, that scourge of all things good and venerable, displaced the knights from their sovereign territory of Malta, they have had no home but Rome, where they exist in uncomfortable proximi- ty to the papacy. But Fra Bertie, a simple friar but also, it seems, a considerable diplomat, persuaded the Maltese govern- ment in 1991 to hand back to the knights the famous fortress of San' Angelo. This figured in the ferocious siege of the island in the 1560s, when 540 knights, 400 Spanish troops and 4,000 Maltese held at bay the entire forces of the Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its power. So, thanks to Fra Bertie, the knights are back in Malta again after nearly two centuries.
Now I know that the Knights of Malta are no great shakes in the modern world and that they have some pretty odd ideas of what is important. They are, to begin with, tremendous snobs. One reason Fra Bertie was elected is that he is one of the few Englishmen who can 'prove' 16 quarters of nobility. A new book just published about the order (The Knights of Malta by H.J.A. Sire, Yale UP, £28) devotes an entire coloured plate to these, and very quaint they look. There are 10,000 knights today and becoming one is like joining a club. You have to be supported by four existing knights but there are three categories of admission — Honour and Devotion, Grace and Devotion and Magistral Grace. For the third, and lowest, category you don't need any quarterings at all, and that now com- prises most of the knights. But for Honour and Devotion you have to have 16, and obviously these knightly animals are more equal than the others.
I first became interested in the knights back in the early 1950s, when I heard rumours that Cardinal Canali, the last Roman cardinal to be cast in the heroic mould of a Renaissance scoundrel, was try- ing to take over their possessions. This monster was a master of intrigue, a com- modity much in use during the last years of old Pius XII, and he very nearly succeeded in his object. However, one of the order's highest officials, Count Cattaneo, leaked the story, complete with authenticating papers, to the French novelist Roger Peyre- fitte. He presented the tale, suitably dressed up, in a sensational roman a clef, Les Chevaliers de Malte (1957). It caused quite a stir and I read it with avidity but
couldn't quite believe that all the skuldug- gery it revealed was true. However, Sire claims that, in all essentials, Peyrefitte described exactly what happened. The novel effectively did the trick for the knights, frustrating Canali's plot, and the next year Pius XII died, thus making way for a modern Vatican where the Canalis have no place.
Obviously the order is very rich, other- wise it would not have been worth Canali's while to try to grab its property. And today it is much richer and bigger than in Canali's time, with nearly 40 national associations and thousands of valuable properties all over the world. Indeed I suspect it is much richer than Opus Dei, and in many ways as influential, though it is careful to attract much less attention. It is no longer a fight- ing order, of course, though a surprising number of the knights have seen active ser- vice (Fra Bertie was in the Scots Guards). The nearest it now has to a navy are the ambulance boats it runs on some of the big lakes of Africa and the Americas. But the ambulance services it operates all over the world, its hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and health centres form what is almost certainly the largest voluntary network of medical care the world has ever seen. In short, it is a modern monument of do-goodery, served up, as it were, on a silver salver.
One of the features of its charitable work are the caravans of the sick and dying it takes annually, from all over the world, to the miraculous shrine at Lourdes. This is where the women come in. The top knights of the order have to be celibate but the lower knights marry, and their wives and friends, whether quartered or not, supply the nurses. Working on one of these con- voys is therefore frightfully smart, but the duties are no more agreeable than any other form of nursing.
My talkative little friend who goes to Lourdes with them reports: 'Some of the sick people we take are awfully old and decrepit. They're all tremendously sweet but — you know. Well, I don't at all mind wiping their bums and washing down the latrines and all that sort of thing. But I draw the line at sharing a room with one of the other nurses. Why, the last time my room-mate had smelly feet and I nearly died. Can you imagine?'
Well, I can, actually. So the knights and their ladies go soldiering on, and good luck to them and their work.
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