Prince Andrew joins ‘rogues gallery’ of disgraced noble men removed from the Order of the Garter – including a nun-abducting knight and Emperor Hirohito

When the nobleman Osbert Giffard kidnapped two nuns from a nunnery in 1286, he was deemed to no longer represent the best chivalry England expected and was ordered to be “deprived” of his “spurs, saddle, bridle, and sword.”

The exile of this aristocratic oppressor from English society inspired the legendary Order of the Garter, declared in 1348 to protect the highest honor and impose severe censures on knights guilty of ‘bringing shame’.

The Most Noble Order of the Garter, King Henry III. It was founded by Edward VIII and is the most senior chivalric order in Britain.

Prince Andrew became a royal knight in 2006. Since the 14th century, membership has been bestowed by the monarch personally in recognition of outstanding service to the Crown or contribution to national life.

Now Andrew, in addition to exercising the title of duke, renounced his highest honor; History will judge how successful he was compared to the rogues gallery of his disgraced predecessors who were expelled from the Order of the Garter.

Nearly a century after Giffard’s encounter with the nuns, Garter member Sir Ralph Gray, a Lancastrian, was defeated by forces from Yorkshire and duly captured by King Edward IV.

According to the records of historian Stephanie Trigg, in 1464 Sir Ralph was condemned to have his “spurs shot off his heels by the cook” and his coat of arms “to be torn from his body.” If that wasn’t bad enough, he was ordered to wear a ‘reverse’ crest.

If Sir Ralph had optimistically hoped that such humiliations, however horrific they were in 15th-century high society, would mitigate his punishment, he would have been disappointed to learn that they would only be carried out while en route to visit an executioner, who later duly beheaded him.

Former Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1935. Hirohito was expelled from the order during World War II, when Japan fought alongside Nazi Germany against the United Kingdom and the Allies.

Sir Ralph Gray (pictured) was stripped of his title before he was beheaded

In fact, throughout the long and bloody history of the Order of the Garter, those who dishonored its distinguished reputation have felt the sharp edge of an executioner’s knife before any appeal to European-style magistrates was invented.

Sanctions may be less physically severe these days, but they remain reputationally lethal. Only around 40 knights of the Garter in nearly 700 years were subjected to ‘humiliation’, the name for expulsion.

While Andrew has not suffered this fate, as his title has been suspended, he is still among dubious company, along with the likes of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, who was ‘humiliated’ in 1941.

In Hirohito’s case, the honor of chivalry was considered incompatible with his bloodthirsty troops waging a brutal campaign of terror against British soldiers who were forced to work and die on the Burma Railway.

And yet, after the Second World War, Emperor Hirohito’s accession was reinstated by the late Queen in 1971 to symbolize renewed diplomatic relations.

Her late husband Prince Philip was once quoted as saying of the Garter: ‘It’s a nice show that I think a lot of people enjoy… Logically it’s crazy but in practice I think everyone enjoys it.’

One who properly considers the punishments to be meted out to malevolent knights will perhaps inevitably find himself in VIII. It was Henry. Between 1516 and 1519 he revised the charter to include the special measure of ‘humiliation’ for ‘knights living in disgrace’.

In the fourteenth century, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was found guilty of treason and ‘humiliated’. He escaped and was sentenced to death in absentia, but died from wounds received during a boar hunt in 1392.

In 1397, Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, was expelled from the Order of the Garter and thrown into the Tower of London after being accused of treason, but was later released.