The custom of cutting the tablecloth with a knife or dagger before a knight who had in any way degraded himself[895] is said, by some, to have been brought into use by Duguesclin, though others affirm that he only renewed an ancient habit. Much more severe inflictions, also, were destined for those who had dishonoured the Order to which they belonged by cowardice, treachery, or any other unmanly crime. The criminal, condemned to be stripped of his knighthood, was placed upon a scaffold, in the sight of the populace, while his armour was broken to pieces before his face. His shield reversed, with the coat-of-arms effaced, was dragged through the dirt, while the heralds proclaimed aloud his crime and his sentence. The king-at-arms then thrice demanded his name; and at each time, when the pursuivant replied, the king added, "A faithless and disloyal traitor!" A basin[896] of hot water was poured upon the culprit's head, to wash away the very memory of his knighthood; and, being drawn on a hurdle to the church, he was covered with a pall, while the funeral prayers were pronounced over him, as one dead to honour and to fame. Notwithstanding every means taken to uphold it, Chivalry gradually declined from the beginning of the fourteenth century. In England the long civil wars between the houses of York and Lancaster called into action a thousand principles opposed to knightly courtesy and generosity. Many flashes of the chivalrous spirit blazed up from time to time, it is true; but the general character of those contentions was base and interested treachery on all parts. The mean and avaricious spirit which seized upon Henry VII. in his latter years of course had its effect on his court and country; and the infamous extortions of his creatures Empson and Dudley, the ruin which they brought upon many of the nobility, and the disgust and terror which their tyranny spread through the land, served to check all those pageants and exercises which kept alive the sinking flame of Chivalry. Henry VIII., in the vigour of his youth, made vast efforts to give back to knighthood its ancient splendour; but the spirit had been as much injured as the external form, and though he could renew the one, he could not recall the other. The wavering tyranny of his old age also did more to extinguish the last sparks of knightly feeling, than his youth had done to revive the pomp of Chivalry. Then came the Reformation, and a new enthusiasm grew up through the land. In Germany the reign of the Emperor Maximilian was the last in which Chivalry can be said to have existed. Charles V. reduced all things to calculation, and though the name of knighthood remained, it soon became nothing but a sound.