Why stop when you’re on a roll?

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Today marks the first anniversary of Their Majesties’ coronation, and there have been some public ceremonies to commemorate.

A few days ago the coronation roll was unveiled, serving as a written record of the proceedings that took place in the abbey (and some of the key events leading up to it) as well as listing all the prominent attendees. As this was the first British coronation to take place in the internet age, a digital version of the roll has also been set up, interlaced with video interviews from many of the core participants.

David Torrance has produced a lengthy briefing document for the House of Commons library about it.

In for the short haul

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The digital illustration of coats of arms, and the uploading of such illustrations on Wikipedia, has been a pursuit of mine for more than seven years now. My productivity in this hobby has not been uniform. There have been some months in which I have uploaded nothing at all (e.g. October 2020) and others in which I have uploaded a great many (e.g. more than a hundred in August 2018).

The four months of 2024 so far have been at the low end, with only thirteen illustrations in the year so far – and April in particular having just one – that being the nineteenth-century judge Arthur, Lord Hobhouse.

This is not likely to improve any time soon, as I have long since exhausted the opportunities afforded by Burke, Cracroft and Debrett.

As I have mentioned before, I eagerly await the publication once every three months of the College of Arms’s newsletter, and the prospect of new blazons within, only to be regularly underwhelmed by the reality.

Yesterday’s edition did little to break the trend: Four new blazons were announced, of which only one applied to a person with a Wikipedia page. That person was Aamer, Lord Sarfraz, whose arms were actually granted two years ago and illustrated by me not long after based on the photograph shown on his website.

Much more interesting, and substantial, was the section about corporate heraldry. Two examples were given, one being the British Airways Board (again, already known). The newsletter was supplemented by a booklet about corporate grants, which was a substantial read in itself. Though the general principles described are those already articulated elsewhere on the college’s website, the style of the publication is radically different to what I am used to seeing from them and perhaps represents a significant change in approach. One might almost think they were advertising…

That Time of Year Again

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Lord Kakkar by Roger Harris, 2019 (CC-BY-3.0)

St George’s Day – 23rd April – is the traditional day for announcing new appointments to the Order of the Garter. The King today named three new ordinary knights and one new royal lady:

  • The Lord Peach, Chief of the Defence Staff 2016-18. This is fairly unsurprising as another former chief, Lord Stirrup, is also part of the order, as were many other (though not all) chiefs before him.
  • The Lord Kakkar, former Chairman of the Appointments Commissions for both the House of Lords and the Judiciary. He is most prominently known for his work in business and medicine.
  • The Lord Lloyd-Webber, one of the musical composers for the coronation, is probably the most famous. It is perhaps a little surprising that he went directly to the Garter and was not offered the Royal Victorian Order first.
  • The Duchess of Gloucester, President of the Royal Academy of Music since 1997. This appointment is a bit of a departure from convention as, while royals by birth are nearly all given the Garter as a matter of course (Princess Margaret and Prince Michael being odd exceptions), royals by marriage (unless their spouse be first in line to the throne or already sitting on it) generally are not. This honour is presumably in thanks for the additional duties the duchess has taken on since the winding down of Elizabeth II’s reign, and in particular during Charles III’s recent illness. It remains to be seen if the Duchess of Kent will be extended the same.

In addition to these appointments, there was some reshuffling of honorary offices among the other orders of chivalry which in recent years had fallen vacant or merged with the crown: The Queen was made Grand Master of the Order of the British Empire (last held by the Prince Philip, 1953-2021) while the Prince of Wales was made Great Master of the Order of the Bath (last held by Charles himself from 1974 until his accession).

The most revolutionary of today’s changes regards the Order of the Companions of Honour. This was created in 1917 alongside the Order of the British Empire and designed to reward outstanding achievements in art, science, medicine or public service among people who would not accept titular dignities. Appointments are made on ministerial advice. Currently the order has a quota of sixty-five ordinary members, of which two places are currently vacant. There is also one honorary member, the Indian economist Amartya Sen. Until now, no member of the royal family had been appointed a Companion of Honour. Given the origins of the institution, it seems a little odd that His Majesty (or the Prime Minister) would choose to create the supernumerary category of Royal Companion (similar to that in the Garter), and to make his daughter-in-law the Princess of Wales the first incumbent. This stands in contrast to the Order of Merit, in which Elizabeth II appointed both her husband and her son as full members on the same basis as all the others.

In armorial terms, obviously this will mean four new banners to hang in St George’s Chapel. The Duchess of Gloucester’s arms are well-known, and I have already found and illustrated those of Lord Kakkar (though doubtless his increased prominence will lead to a better rendering by a different artist soon enough), but Peach and Lloyd-Webber are a mystery – the former having been ennobled too recently to appear in the last print of Debrett’s.

UPDATE (24th April)

There are now three vacancies among the Companions of Honour, as it transpires that the Lord Field of Birkenhead died while I was writing this post.

New World Heraldry with Bruce Patterson

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The Oxford University Heraldry Society often plays host to reasonably esteemed academics in their field, but incumbent officers of arms themselves are a rare treat. This evening our guest speaker was Bruce Patterson, Saint-Laurent Herald of Arms in Ordinary and Deputy Chief Herald of Canada. He gave us an overview of the history of Canadian heraldry from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.

Canada began as a colony within New France, and thus naturally used the French royal arms. In the 1760s sovereignty was taken over by the Kingdom of Great Britain and exercised by the Hudson Bay Company. In 1826 the Canada Company was created to recruit Brits to emigrate to the under-developed parts of the colony. Both of these corporations had grants of arms.

Grants of arms to Canadian citizens were mostly the responsibility of the College of Arms and the Lyon Court until 4th June 1988 when the Canadian Heraldic Authority was established as part of the Governor-General’s office. The government at the time deemed the existence of a home-owned heraldic authority to be an essential feature of a sovereign nation. The physical headquarters of the CHA are found at La Salle Academy complex, along with the rest of the Canadian honours system. The individual offices of arms within the authority are named after Canada’s rivers. The Chief Herald has a blue and black tabard, but the other heralds merely wear morning dress in contrast to their British counterparts (as illustrated by a photograph from the Diamond Jubilee pageant in 2012). The CHA has an arrangement with the CoA regarding the supply of drawings of older grants, and the former lacks the latter’s vast genealogical remit.

The Authority issues grants on letters patent and, like its parent institutions, allows recipients to choose the level of extravagance and ornamentation in their design. A distinctly Canadian feature is that the blazon is written in both French and English, with grantees able to choose which language takes precedence. Other distinctive Canadian features are that male and female armigers use identical arrangements of elements and that cadency is determined on a personal basis rather than according to any standardised convention. Canadian grants often combine symbols familiar in European and Inuit traditions – most prominently in the arms of Mary Simon.

Patterson rounded off with some illustrations of the royal achievement of Canada itself, as well as the sovereign’s banner of arms and the new variant of the Tudor crown.

The lecture aimed for breadth rather than depth (as this blog post likely reflects), and served better as an introduction for beginners than a deep dive for the devout. If this proves to be the teaser for a long-running series I would be overjoyed, especially as I have not found many session of the Royal Canadian Heraldry Society advertised on Eventbrite for quite some time.

Waving the White Flag

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In recent weeks there has been some reshuffling of responsibilities within the royal family: The King and the Princess of Wales have both been undergoing cancer treatment, limiting their ability to carry out public engagements away from their residences. Consequently, a greater burden has fallen on His Majesty’s wife and ever-trusty sister.

The Queen’s recent sole engagements have included Douglas City Hall on the Isle of Man (for the presentation of the letters patent to confer city status), and Worcester Cathedral (for the Maundy service ahead of Easter).

As was noted in Mark Scott’s lecture a month ago, the granting of banners of arms to members of the royal family is a separate event from the granting of the armorial achievement itself (rather than being automatic as it would be for lesser armigers). Eighteen months into her tenure as queen consort, it appears that Camilla’s own banner has not been granted, for I have repeatedly seen the Bentley State Limousine flying the ermine-bordered version of the royal standard used for lesser members of the firm who had not been granted personalised heraldic flags of their own, while the shield affixed to the roof shows the arms of the sovereign undifferenced.

As is so often the case, the Wikimedia Community have moved much faster than reality – a graphic representing Camilla’s banner as queen consort was uploaded preemptively way back in 2016 and has been used in multiple articles since her husband’s accession. Perhaps this will need to be revised in light of new evidence.

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In Honour of the Occasion

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Photograph by sbclick, 2011 (CC-BY-1.0)

In theory the monarch can bestow practically any accolade on any person at any time and for any reason. In practice, since the late Victorian age there has been a trend towards grouping announcements into two big lists each year – one in June for the sovereign’s official birthday, one in December for the upcoming new year. There are also smaller lists issued at irregular intervals to commemorate particular events e.g. the deaths of senior royals, the dissolutions of parliaments and the resignations of prime ministers. The latter two types tend to be particularly controversial.

Wikipedians have generally maintained pages for all of the lists, great and small. They  have also created an annual page called “Special Honours”, which they use as a catch-all term for those titles and decorations which were issued outside of any named occasion.

Today’s announcement is a little confusing for those seeking categorisation – the Prime Minister’s office has released a list of honours and appointments for March 2024. The document as a whole does not have any particular name, but paragraphs within it do: Creative Industries Honours, Technology & Artificial Intelligence Honours, and Political Honours. The former has provoked the most recognition, appointing film producer Emma Thomas as a DBE and her husband Christopher Nolan (already a CBE since 2019) as a knight bachelor. There is also a short list new privy counsellors (e.g. Vaughan Gething, recently appointed as First Minister of Wales), though whether these count as honours in the way knighthoods do is debatable.

This new publication comes just forty-eight days after the list of “Political Peerages” (e.g. yet more new members of the House of Lords). It eludes me why today’s list was not brought forward to be merged with that one, or pushed back to fold in with the Birthday Honours in June. The only likely explanation is that these were Rishi Sunak’s personal picks and he (or His Majesty) wanted that distinction made clear in the public mind. Of course, that could also have been achieved by waiting for the looming dissolution honours at this year’s general election – or indeed Sunak’s resignation honours, which may well come earlier!

Edward gets the Thistle

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The Prince Edward seems to have made a habit of collecting new titles on his birthdays. For the occasion of his wedding in 1999 he was ennobled as Earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn. These both refer to places in England, in contrast with the normal convention for royal peerages. On his fifty-fifth birthday he gained a surprise Scottish title – Earl of Forfar – and then for his fifty-ninth he gained another, long-awaited and far more prestigious one – Duke of Edinburgh. Now that his primary title refers to a Scottish place – and the capital at that – it would seem a little strange for him not to join Scotland’s highest order of chivalry.

It was not exactly surprising, then, to learn that on his sixtieth birthday he had been appointed an Extra Knight of the Order of the Thistle. In this category he joins his nephew the Duke of Rothesay and his sisters the Queen and the Princess Royal. We can expect that soon his banner of arms will be hung alongside theirs at the High Kirk in his namesake city.

The King also announced three new appointments among the ordinary membership of the order – the Baroness Black of Strome, the Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws and Sir Godfrey “Geoff” Palmer – all of whom, curiously, have academic careers. This brings the order up to its full complement of sixteen members (excluding royals). It is unusual for all the appointments to be made today as traditionally they are announced on 18th June.

Finally, a concurrent press release confirmed that the duke had been appointed to a second term as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a post which he last held in 2014-15. In the Scottish order of precedence he will rank immediately below the sovereign himself, rather than his natural precedence as a brother thereof.

Awdry Arms Again

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Back in November I discovered the coat of arms of Sir John Wither Awdry, paternal grandfather of children’s author Wilbert Vere Awdry. The illustration was based on a blazon found in Burke’s Landed Gentry, 1862.

Page 39 of that book gives the shield Argent three cinquefoils Or on a bend Azure cotised of the same and crest out of a ducal coronet a lion’s head Azure for AWDRY OF SEEND.

The next entry is AWDRY OF NOTTON, and it is this one which includes Sir John. For the arms and crest of this branch, Burke merely says “same as AWDRY, of Seend”.

Today I have found the family referenced in the Burke’s Landed Gentry 1921. Page 53 of this book gives a slightly different blazon – shield Argent on a bend Azure cottised Sable between two crescents of the second a crescent between two cinquefoils Or and crest on a wreath of the colours in front of a lion’s head erased Azure gorged with a collar gemel Argent a cinquefoil between two crescents fesseways Or. Curiously the entry for Awdry of Seend in this edition gives no armorial details at all. Wilbert was ten years old when this version came out, and his date of birth is given in his father’s paragraph but no other detail about him personally is included.

The Awdrys are also mentioned at least twice by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies in his Armorial Families series. Page 51 of the 1895 book gives entries for multiple Awdry men, each time with the same information about Sir John’s arms – shield Argent on a bend cottised Azure three cinquefoils Or a crescent of the second for difference and crest out of a ducal coronet Or a lion’s head Azure. He also takes care to note that these are armorial bearings as used, and as quoted in Burke’s “Landed Gentry”, but for which no authority has been established. These comply with the blazon as I first encountered it, except that the crescent for difference was not originally there. The crescent, of course, is the traditional English mark of cadency for an armiger’s second son. I find it a little odd that Fox-Davies types the exact same information out for each of Sir John’s many sons whom he records, but does not say if any of them added extra cadency marks for their own position in the family tree. Pages 55 and 56 of the 1910 book gives the exact same blazon as Burke’s 1921.

For now I will accept the later version as the correct one and I have modified my illustration accordingly. Pending further research, I would speculate that the Awdrys of Seend are the senior branch of the family with the relatively simple arms while the Awdrys of Notton are the long-established offshoot with permanent (although inconsistently recorded) augmentations.

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A Cluster of Camerons

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Donald Andrew John Cameron was elected to the devolved Scottish Parliament in 2016 on the regional list for Highlands & Islands. He served in many roles in the shadow cabinet at Holyrood, but last month resigned his seat upon appointment as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland in the national government at Westminster. To facilitate these duties he was ennobled yesterday as Baron Cameron of Lochiel, of Achnacarry in the County of Inverness. Although this is a life peerage, he also holds the hereditary chieftancy of Clan Cameron, of which two other members currently sit in the upper house – and both of them acted as supporters to his introduction ceremony.

Ewan James Hanning Cameron, Baron Cameron of Dillington, has sat as a crossbencher since 2004, having previously worked in semi-political rural advocacy roles during the premiership of Tony Blair. He is a grandson of Sir Donald Walter Cameron, the 25th Clan Chief, thus making him an agnatic first cousin once removed of Lord Cameron of Lochiel.

David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, should already be familiar to most readers as the former prime minister and current foreign secretary. His consanguinity to the new peer is very distant, his great-great-grandfather Sir Ewen Cameron having claimed descent from the Camerons of Erracht, themselves being descended from a younger son of the 13th Lochiel and branching from the main clan in the sixteenth century.

The arms of Clan Cameron are Gules three bars Or. Lochiel naturally bears these undifferenced, while Dillington differences with in the honour point an escallop of the second. Chipping Norton differences with four bezants in chief.

The House of Commons also saw an introduction ceremony yesterday when George Galloway returned after a nine year absence having been elected MP for Rochdale. MPs who win by-elections are also traditionally escorted to the clerks’ table by two incumbent members. There were reports that Galloway had asked Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) and Sir David Davis (Haltemprice & Howden) to act as his sponsors but both had turned him down. He was instead accompanied by Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) and Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldey & Cowdenbeath).

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Notes on the Memorial of Constantine II at Windsor

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People of prominence often find that one period of mourning is not enough. For many of high status there will be the funeral itself within weeks of their death and then a separate, less formal, memorial service as much as a year later. Prince Philip had one of these in 2022, as did Lady Boothroyd last month.

Constantine II, King of the Hellenes 1964-73, died on 10 January 2023 and his funeral was held in Athens six days later. Yesterday a thanksgiving service took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, hosted and attended by the British royals.

Although it was a British-hosted event, only the Greek family’s website seems to list the order of service or any photographs. The order of service is has the late monarch’s arms illustrated on the first cover and those of the Order of the Garter on the last. This time the illustration is not that by Sodacan for Wikimedia Commons. I cannot identify the artist for this one, nor which typeface was used for the prose.

Most intriguing about the online material is that it highlights the contribution of the Lord Soames of Fletching. There is even a link to his website, which is still up even though it clearly hasn’t been updated since the most recent general election.