Monthly Archives: Dec 2025

The King’s Cancer Message

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Since the announcement last February that His Majesty had (an unspecified form of) cancer, speculation about the monarch’s health was inevitable. In just the past few days I found a handful of headlines suggesting that he was on death’s door:

The above are the few I can find that are close to original. There were plenty of duplicate headlines either from other news sources that were mirror sites of these, or that repackaged the same articles, or at least referred to these as their source. They all seem to come from one interview with an unnamed royal insider and the story was not picked up by any of the remotely reputable British papers (or even some of the fairly disreputable ones) so I would judge that it is safe to dismiss as trash.

Early yesterday it was announced that Charles III himself would release a message about his experience. Some outlets referred to this as his “cancer journey”. Based on the headlines above, one would expect the message to be that he would soon, well… arrive. The message wasn’t actually released until after 8pm, so for the entire day viewers were held in suspense. This strikes me as perhaps a misstep, since the vacuum allowed further morbid rumours to circulate.

The King actually announced that he was recovering and his treatment could be reduced next year. Clearly, he does expect to see the Christmases of 2026, 2027 and beyond after all.

The message was uploaded on the royal family’s official YouTube channel as a standalone video but it was also broadcast on Channel 4 as part of an episode of Stand Up to Cancer. The video on the YouTube channel was clearly extracted directly from the television broadcast as, unlike their other videos, there were no title cards featuring any royal insignia. Instead all the onscreen graphics were from Channel 4, and it even had the “4” logo in the top left corner throughout. This could be an oversight, or perhaps it was at the channel’s own insistence.

Notes on the German State Visit

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Last week Windsor Castle hosted the last of three state visits this year, featuring Frank-Walter Steinmeier & Elke BĂźdenbender, President & First Lady of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This one made the news far less (most likely because it was far less controversial) than that of Donald Trump in September. Unlike Trump, Steinmeier was able to partake in the public-facing elements of a state visit, such as the carriage ride through the streets of Windsor and an address in the royal gallery of the House of Lords.

This was in some ways the reciprocation of the state visit which our King & Queen made to Germany in 2023. In his state banquet speech Steinmeier said to Charles

“the fact that your very first trip abroad as King brought you to Germany was a special symbol of the German-British friendship, a gesture of appreciation which meant a great deal to me and to us Germans.”

This is not strictly true as Their Majesties had been planning to visit France first, but that visit was postponed a few months as Macron dealt with protests over state pensions.

The King’s speech at the same event included this quip

“our languages, English and German, [ ] share such deep common roots, but now do sound a little different. It is undoubtedly true, that your language contains a very large number of very long words. As someone who has spent some time trying to learn a little Welsh, I have some sympathy for the proposition that needless gaps between words are a dreadfully inefficient use of paper… “

There was no exchange of honours this time, as Steinmeier had already been appointed an honorary GCB during the aforementioned 2023 visit. He and Charles both wore their red sashes to dinner. The Prime Minister, a KCB, notably continues not to wear his badge.

The Duke of Kent did not attend the state banquet but he later separately met the Bundespräsident at a service at Coventry Cathedral, to commemorate its bombing during the Second World War. It is worth remembering that the Duke is now the only living British prince to have been born before that war started. We got a rare glimpse of his royal cypher on a wreath lain at the old altar.

Steinmeier also had a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street. While his state visit was still going on Starmer also had an unrelated meeting with the Prime Minister of Norway, and already since the President’s departure he has held another “Coalition of the Willing” meeting including Chancellor Merz.

From a ceremonial perspective there is little innovation here (bar a lot of stories about tiaras), as the proceedings stuck closely to the template established by recent precedents. The most interesting parts are His Majesty’s and His Excellency’s speeches, which I think, well, speak for themselves.

Recent state visits have been good opportunities for uploading free-licence photographs to Wikimedia Commons but sadly on this occasion the pickings have been very limited as the government Flickr accounts’ only pictures of Steinmeier are of his visit to Downing Street, leaving out anything involving the royals. Those on the Parliamentary accounts are not released under the correct licence, and it doesn’t look as if the German government has the same attitude to copyright that the British one does so finding anything from their end is also unlikely.

David Lammy and Bleak House

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David Lammy, in his new role as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice, has recently announced plans to tackle a long-running backlog of cases in the English & Welsh judicial system by severely narrowing the circumstances in which juries are used for deciding the verdicts in criminal cases, transitioning trials for less serious offences to relying solely on the judge. These plans are highly controversial, with detractors expressing suspicion that he will undermine long-standing principles of English constitutionalism as well as scepticism that the move will actually save any time or money.

Lammy has attracted particular ridicule for a comment in an interview that was reported in The Times two days ago:

I remember studying Bleak House for my A-levels, and the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case that went on and on and on. We cannot go back to a Victorian system in which all new people who are the victims of crime don’t get justice.

The 1853-2 novel Bleak House is a satire of the English court system of the early nineteenth century and is credited with spurring on reforms later in that century, but to use the Jarndyce case (or any of the real one inspiring it) as a justification for Lammy’s proposals is nonsensical as this was a probate case in the Court of Chancery (later succeeded by the Chancery Division in the High Court of England & Wales) not a criminal case, and crucially it did not involve any juries!

Then again, the Lord Chancellor is not the only one to fail to understand that story: Over recent years (well, decades really) there have been growing concerns among the intellectual classes that their own numbers may functional literacy among the populations of developed countries is going into decline. One particular alarm bell was sounded last year in A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities, entitled “They Don’t Read Very Well“, which used the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House as the yardstick. A worrying proportion of English majors (for whom reading literature should really be a specialist skill) struggled to understand it.

I listened to the LibriVox recording of Bleak House in 2022 and watched the BBC adaptation of it in 2024. I know from reading through Great Expectations that Dickens, being paid by the word, had a habit of using far too many when far fewer would do, but the idea that his works may be slipping out of human comprehension, even among those who have specifically chosen literature as a course of study, has implications which themselves are bleaker than the house could ever be.

Ongoing Heraldic Stories

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In this post I have new updates on three different heraldry-related stories that I have covered before.

The Greater London Authority

The campaign by the Greater London Authority to acquire the iconic armorial achievement of its predecessor body the Greater London Council has been successful. The King issued a royal warrant on Thursday 13th November authorising the transfer, though frustratingly it the corresponding notice in the London Gazette was not published until yesterday.

British Passports

(I’ve discussed this topic ad nauseam by now so won’t link specific earlier posts.)

It was announced by the Home Office in October that a new British passport design would be coming out which featured Timothy Noad’s illustration of the royal arms with the Tudor crown in place of the previous design favoured by Elizabeth II. Recently the story has been picked up by newspapers as the new passports actually come out.

The Prince & Princess of Wales

I and other heraldists have been waiting for some time to see evidence of William & Catherine updating their personal heraldry to reflect the former’s status as heir apparent. While searching for news stories about the GLA I found articles in Hello!, People, Marie Claire and The News International (though curiously none of the more mainstream outlets) reported that when the couple attended the Royal Variety Performance last month, their invitation printed by the charity featured their conjugal coat of arms in the updated format. The style is very clearly Sodacan, and it looks as if the particular image was created on 12th April 2023 by user Mangwanani but not actually used in any articles until 22nd November this year, presumably for lack of evidence of real-life usage. Whoever found the image for the invitation must have dug rather deeply into Wikimedia Commons to find it. Reports in the aforesaid magazines that the Prince & Princess have made this change themselves seem a little misguided as it would not have been their own office in charge of producing the image, and recent evidence of their own correspondence still shows their old-style cyphers in use (not the lack of an arch on the coronet). This is thus yet another example of Wikipedians not just getting ahead of real life, but actually pushing it along a little, however inadvertently.

The new programme can be contrasted with this one from 2023, which still uses their conjugal arms as Duke & Duchess of Cambridge (or rather as son & daughter-in-law of the heir apparent), even though the new graphic image had already existed for seven months and William had held the status of heir apparent for more than a year. The old graphic still showed Catherine’s shield with a cordelière around it to balance William’s Garter circlet, even though she had been made a GCVO in 2019. Note too that the great many depictions of the main royal arms still alternate between old and new variants.

Update on Andrew

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It has been just over a month since Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, would be formally stripped of the title of Prince as well as the title Duke of York. Notices to this effect were published in the London Gazette (see my previous posts). I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the Ministry of Justice to see the full texts of the legal instruments in play. The answer arrived yesterday:

Your request has been handled under the FOIA. I can confirm that the MoJ does hold some information related to your request, it has no plans to publish the texts of the Warrant and Letters Patent relating to the Peerage Roll and title “Prince”. The Warrants relating to the Order of the Garter and Royal Victorian Order are not matters for this Department and you may wish to contact the Cabinet Office to request this information.

This feels like a refusal, and indeed the Ministry’s response does not include the documents I requested, and yet those very same documents were released to the public yesterday.

In the run-up to this I emailed Jason Loch of A Venerable Puzzle, François Velde of Heraldica and David Torrance of the House of Commons Library (no reply from the latter). I also wanted to inform Benjamin Lewis but could not find his contact details. Loch had submitted his own request and has already put out his analyses of both documents. There are many peculiarities compared to other such instruments which might be considered the nearest precedents.

Notable in the patent is that it begins with “AND WHEREAS” in the first clause, when logically that shouldn’t happen until the second. It also doesn’t refer to “Prince Andrew” first and then explain that he is being renamed “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor” but instead refers to him by his plain name from the start. There’s also the fact that the patent omits any greeting and the warrant declines to name a recipient. A lot of the flowery formalities normally seen in documents like this are likewise notable for their absence.

In part these oddities may be a deliberate choice by the Palace in response to the circumstances which forced this action (e.g. Andrew can hardly be called “Most dear and entirely beloved”) and in part they could be explained by the extreme haste in which this operation has been carried out. Even so, questions about constitutional propriety are likely to linger.

There have been further notices in the Gazette yesterday that Andrew’s appointments to the Royal Victorian Order and the Order of the Garter have been revoked. Jason or I may need to submit another request to see those legal instruments now as well.

It should be noted too, that since these instruments were originally signed off Andrew has gone through yet another change of name, very petty this time: The patent and warrant, along with the press release on 30th October, give him the surname “Mountbatten Windsor”, omitting the hyphen that normally appeared there. This was corrected twelve days later, and the Gazette notices from yesterday show his surname in the hyphenated form. This, of course, required the third movement of his Wikipedia page in the space of two months.