Category Archives: In the News

The Deputy & The Duchess

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The Duchess’s Heraldic Achievement

Documentaries about the stormy second premiership of Harold Wilson (1974-6) often mention his determination to take the nation by surprise after months of all his government’s secrets being leaked to a vicious press. In the end he pulled off the particularly-impressive trick of resigning on the same day that the Princess Margaret finalised her divorce from the Earl of Snowdon, and therefore knocked the latter story off the front pages. No doubt this spared the royal family a lot of grief.

Today a similar coincidence has been achieved in reverse – Angela Rayner resigned as Deputy Prime Minister, and Buckingham Palace announced the death of the Duchess of Kent. There is something a little uncanny in these events happening so close to the anniversary of Liz Truss’s accession to the premiership and Charles III’s accession to the throne. The public mourning over the deceased Queen Elizabeth obviously didn’t save the Truss government, but did at least postpone its inevitable disintegration. Neither of today’s events are quite on the scale of those but, even so, the cabinet will likely be glad of the news – and Parliament – having a different story to occupy their time.

I will deal with Rayner first. Obviously her property tax scandal is a further reputational blow for a government whose public approval ratings were already abysmal. Her departure could cause some practical issues, too. Rayner simultaneously resigned from three offices: Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government. The latter is the one of greatest constitutional substance, for each Secretary of State is a corporation sole defined in statute with responsibility for a government department, in this case the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. The MHCLG cannot operate effectively without its secretary of state so a successor to Rayner will need to be appointed within days and confirmed at a meeting of the Privy Council shortly afterward. The middle is of course not a government office but a party one. Deputy Leaders are elected by a postal ballot of the rank-and-file partisans in an operation that typically takes months. This will be the first time in decades that the Deputy has been replaced without the actual Leader also changing (unless Sir Keir Starmer somehow also ends up resigning imminently) and, given the unpopularity of the current government among the party’s base, it could be a major opportunity for dissident factions to attempt a strike against front bench. The internecine fighting is bound to highlight controversies and resentments on which the opposition parties can pounce. The former will be the more interesting to watch: As I have mentioned before, the Deputy Prime Minister is constitutionally little more than a courtesy title rather than a substantive office and many premiers can do without appointing one. There is no obligation for the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party to be deputy leader (whether en titre or de facto) of a Labour government – notably Harriet Harman wasn’t. Even so, the Deputy probably need to have some kind of senior government post, for as a backbencher they would be too free to criticise and challenge the incumbent. If the eventual winner of the election is not already a cabinet minister then it may necessitate another minor reshuffle. In the meantime, though the Prime Minister will need a designated survivor, he would probably be better off not appointing a new DPM, nor a First Secretary of State, as whoever landed that job would then have then have to endure the indignity of relinquishing it a few months later and, since everyone would predict this in advance, would probably struggle to accomplish much of worth during that time.

Moving on to the Duchess: Born in 1933, she was the oldest among the royal family, a status which now passes to her 89-year-old widower Edward. Her death does not create a vacancy in the Firm, as she very quietly retired from public duties a few years ago and was absent for nearly all of the big ceremonial gatherings since then.1 At the time of writing the exact date of the Duchess’s funeral has not been announced, but based on usual time lapses it should be concluded before the halfway point of this month and thus narrowly avoid clashing with either Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom or the Duke of Edinburgh’s attendance at Papua New Guinea’s semicentennial independence celebrations. Katharine was the first British royal since the Glorious Revolution to convert to Roman Catholicism, and it has been stated that her funeral will follow Catholic liturgy. That will be an innovation for the House of Windsor too, as the only thing approaching a recent precedent is the reinterment of Richard III in 2013, and even that was technically an ecumenical affair. The Duke of Kent has been steadily winding down his commitments in recent years but is still considered a senior working royal. It is yet to be seen if the death of his wife will lead to any changes in his arrangements. The Ferens Building at the University of Hull (not to be confused with Ferens Hall) has her name on its keystone and the Prime Minister’s statement this afternoon mentioned that she was “giving her time and working anonymously as a music teacher at a school in Hull”. It will be interesting to see if any of her pupils are involved in the funeral, or indeed if there will be any local ceremonies to celebrate her association.

1The latest reference I can find in the Court Circular to her attending in person, rather than being represented by someone else, is 8th June 2019. I note that the “Where is Kate?” crisis of eighteen months ago failed to notice or care that the other Katharine had been “missing” for a much longer time.

UPDATE (8pm)

In the time between drafting this article and uploading it, Sir Keir has ignored my advice and carried out a full reshuffle, appointing David Lammy as DPM and Lord Chancellor (interestingly making the same career move as Dominic Raab four years ago) and replacing Rayner at MHCLG with Steve Reed, among many other changes. No timetable or candidates have yet been confirmed for the Deputy Leadership.

Everything in my Power

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As we have recently celebrated the eightieth anniversary of VE and VJ Day, I have naturally been reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of documentaries about the end of World War II in both Germany and Japan. The mechanics and political technicalities of the German surrender are particularly fascinating to me, as the event represented not only the cessation of fighting but also the succession of states – with the Third Reich dissolving in favour of the Allied occupation zones. It is a reminder that, even in times of total war and with the prospect of total annihilation, there are still laws and protocols which must be followed, most notably the famous Geneva Conventions.

Key to the successful operation of these laws is the presence of at least a small number of neutral countries which maintain diplomatic relations – however strained – with both factions. This can lead to some interesting shenanigans: When my late grandmother got me A. J. P. Taylor’s1 The First World War for Christmas 2013 I was amused to read that before the United States took a side there were British and German ambassadors in Washington D.C. competing for Woodrow Wilson’s favour in loans and arms contracts. The novel Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs (which I read in the summer of 2018) has a subplot in which Churchill discovers that Britain is short of rifles and hatches a cunning plan to buy second-hand German ones instead, because the Reich had such a surplus that they were still exporting them commercially to neutral countries on the continent. Though they weren’t explicitly mentioned very often, neutral states and organisations also played an important role in The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies (which I finished last April), since the parcels, letters and so forth that the Allied prisoners received from home were hardly the sort of things which their Axis captors would (or indeed could) have delivered themselves. Neutral countries are also necessary for most forms of reliable news reporting (whether or not related to the war) to get from one side to the other – though how this works in the internet age is probably worth another article.

The specific aspect of wartime diplomacy which interests me for the purposes of this article, and which I only discovered in my recent Wiki-reading, is the concept of “Protecting Powers”. Put simply, this means that when two countries have broken off diplomatic relations (and especially if they have declared war) then their ambassadors and/or other official representatives on each other’s soil will be withdrawn. A neutral third country will then be appointed to act as a go-between while the warring countries cannot communicate directly. This third country will have an “interests section” as a department of its own embassy, and will be the official channel for humanitarian aid, personnel exchanges and, eventually, peace negotiations. In some cases the PP’s embassy will take over the former embassy buildings2 of the country that it protects, and may even re-employ the same lower-level staff, so that the “interests section” is a polite fiction to allow the former embassy to continue in all but name.

There are limits to what a PP can realistically do, as both parties in the conflict must agree to their appointment – a PP which allows its interests section to push too far may see its neutrality questioned by the host country, and then its own diplomatic ties threatened. Switzerland, unsurprisingly, is a popular choice for this role, as is Sweden. The Wikipedia page on Protecting Powers has a catalogue of historic and current examples, noting that by the end of World War II Sweden held 114 mandates involving 28 countries. At the time of writing, the Swedish embassy in North Korea hosts interests sections for ten other states. There was a period in the last decade when Britain broke off relations with Iran, so the Swedish embassy in Tehran hosted a British interests section, while Oman’s in London hosted the Iranian.

Of the serious armed conflicts taking place in the world right now, the most important – at least from a European perspective – is that between Russia and Ukraine. Although relations had already become icy with Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was his launch of a full-scale invasion in February 2022 that saw them broken off entirely. This war has now been going on for 42 months, i.e. more than half as long as Britain was fighting in World War II. Having gotten into this topic, I was naturally curious as to whom the two countries had chosen as their PPs. None of the Wikipedia articles which should have mentioned it actually did so, however, so I asked the question in various talk pages. At time of uploading, only one other contributor has managed to find any information relating to this query: Based on some articles found on a Russian news site, it looks as if there still aren’t any! In a conference in Canada in 2024 (already way too late, really) there were offers by the Vatican, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Lithuania and Qatar to perform the role, but nothing was agreed, though Qatar at least has been involved in some POW exchanges. Putin has said Switzerland lost its neutral status by joining in sanctions on the Russian economy, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (which can also act as PP if no sovereign state is available) has struggled to get access. I might have thought that Turkey would be a candidate, since they had hosted some (unsuccessful, of course) peace talks, but they are not mentioned at all.

This perhaps goes to show that comparisons with the 1940s may be, if anything, a bit understated: To put it bluntly, the current Russian government is at least in some respects failing to comply with protocols which even he of the small moustache managed to honour!

Article from SwissInfo: Russia rejects protecting power mandate agreed by Switzerland and Ukraine (11 August 2022)

Articles from RosBiznesConsulting:

Article from Media Center Ukraine: Bohdan Chumak: The involvement of a protecting power could become an effective tool in securing the return of prisoners of war (8 January 2025)

Article from Al Jazeera: Russia and Ukraine discuss more prisoner exchanges at Istanbul talks (23 July 2025)

1 A. J. P. Taylor is not related to me.

2 Technically the building is called the “chancery” whereas the “embassy” is the organisation hosted there.

August Armorial Announcements

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The Queen’s heraldic banner continues to be a bugbear: Late last month, Sky Sports Racing Tweeted a short video of Her Majesty arriving (by helicopter) at Ascot. The commentator pointed out that upon Her Majesty’s appearance the royal standard was flown, but I noticed that it was again the generic ermine-bordered version and not that impaled with the arms of Bruce Shand, which has been seen in official usage recently. Perhaps the venue simply didn’t have a copy of that one yet?

The slow rollout of the Tudor Crown continues — on 1st August the Australian Department of Defence announced that all three service branches had updated their logos to use the new crown, as well as making other small adjustments to the rest of the graphics.

On the same day, the British Army announced a new cap badge for The King’s Gurkha Artillery Regiment, which likewise has the Tudor Crown on in. Since this regiment did not exist until this year, there was no St Edward’s version to remove in this case.

The King himself appeared at RAF Lossiemouth on 6th August to present a new standard to 42 (Torpedo Bomber) Squadron. I would assume that the Tudor Crown appeared on it, but none of the photographs or footage of the event gave a clear view of the standard itself — which is ironic given that was the whole point of the event!

Progress in the judiciary is less clear. I should remind readers that I am only speaking here about the judiciary of England and Wales, since that in Scotland uses the other version of the royal arms with the Crown of Scotland while that in Northern Ireland is reluctant to use explicit national symbols at all. The United Kingdom Supreme Court, and the Privy Council, have already been discussed.

From the PDFs of recent judgments, it appears that both civil and criminal divisions of the Court of Appeal are still using the old and rather ugly Royal Courts of Justice logo, with the almost-triangular royal shield topped by St Edward’s Crown, as are all three divisions of the High Court. Other courts are less consistent.

I have seen the Crown Court using several different ideas:

It looks as if every different court location has its own document template.

Pondering Thatcher’s Letterheads

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About a decade ago when I first got interested in heraldry, I came across this article in The Independent by Ben Summers and Michael Streeter, dating all the way back to 24th March 1997, early in that year’s general election campaign*. It concerned the use of the British royal arms by the Baroness Thatcher on her official letters.

The wording of the article is a little confusing, and made harder by the absence of any images (unsurprising given the age): It alleges that Lady Thatcher abandoned the use of her own coat of arms for her letters and started using instead the royal arms, in the lesser format favoured by various government departments.

Thatcher’s own heraldic achievement

The journalists interviewed both Black Rod (Sir Edward Jones) who awkwardly declined to comment and Somerset Herald (Thomas Woodcock, later Garter King of Arms) who dismissed a suggestion (made by whom it’s not clear) that Companions of the Garter are specially entitled to use the royal arms in this way.

Government arms as used at the time

The article contrasts Thatcher to Britain’s two other living former premiers at the time – “Sir Edward Heath uses a simple House of Commons portcullis and a plain typeface, while Lord Callaghan simply types his name beside the House of Lords logo.” – and the main thrust is the piece is to play up the public perception of the Iron Lady as not being able to leave government behind and as believing herself as great as the reigning monarch.

Trouble is, I think this is a bit of a reach, given this sentence: “The normal House of Lords logo used by peers places the Arms inside an ellipse, together with the words “House of Lords”, making clear the state body to which the use of the Arms relates.”

With one hand Streeter & Summers allege delusions of grandeur based on Thatcher’s supposed use of the governmental coat of arms instead of the House of Lords logo, but with the other they tacitly admit that the two devices are near-identical anyway! While the page itself does not have any photographs, I have been able to find a handful of examples online as letters by public statesmen often become collectable items sold at auction. The impression I get is that, while letterheads for members of the House of Commons have favoured the crowned portcullis badge** since many decades before Thatcher’s premiership, those for members of the House of Lords at that time used the royal arms in an oval with “House of Lords” typed underneath. Letterheads for government ministers at that time followed the same pattern – the royal arms in an oval with the department name beneath – although there were some rare examples of ministries already using the more modern corporate-style logos that would become characteristic of the New Labour years.

If the authors meant that Thatcher was using the royal arms in her private correspondence – i.e. not related to her parliamentary duties – then they might have had a point, but that is not made clear. I would also note that in all the photographs I’ve found so far, none show peers using their private coats of arms in the headers – a shame, really, as that is one of the main reasons to acquire a coat of arms in the first place.

This could be an example of what the article alleges – albeit it’s from seven years too late.

I’ve tried searching for any documentation of the actual rules around the use of parliamentary letterheads. I found this page for the House of Commons but nothing so far for the Lords.

Here I have collated a series of examples of letters written by Lady Thatcher and other British prime ministers in their legislative (rather than executive) capacities.

Margaret Thatcher

  • 1966-04-01: Letter to Mr & Mrs Bland, with no personal letterhead but logo in top left corner, featuring even lesser royal arms in a portrait oval with “HOUSE OF COMMONS” arched above it.
  • 1971-10-27: Letter to illegible recipient with green portcullis in top centre and “THE RT. HON. MARGARET THATCHER M.P.” above it.
  • 1976-10-28: Letter to Misses Brett and Watson, with blue portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, M.P.” along the top.
  • 1991-12-09: Rear page of a letter to Ed Koch (former Mayor of New York City), with portcullis in blue in top left corner and “THE RT. HON. MARGARET THATCHER, O.M., F.R.S, M.P.” along the top, notable because she is no longer called “Mrs” but not styled “Lady” either despite Denis’s baronetcy.
  • 1991-12-12: Letter to E. T. Freeborough with same layout.
  • 1995-03-01: Letter to Rick Pallack with lesser royal arms (sans oval) in top left corner and “MARGARET, THE LADY THATCHER, O.M., P.C., F.R.S.” along the head.
  • 2003-??-??: Message thanking an unidentified well-wisher for his condolences after the death of Sir Denis, featuring the House of Lords logo as described with “Margaret Thatcher” underneath it and “THE RT. HON. THE BARONESS THATCHER, L.G., O.M., F.R.S.” in the footer. “P.C.” is omitted for some reason.

James Callaghan

  • 1990-09-16: Letter to Andy Wood with House of Lords logo in red and “THE RT. HON. LORD CALLAGHAN OF CARDIFF KG” above it in black. “PC” omitted here too.

Harold Wilson

  • 1973-10-30: Letter to Geoffrey Davis, with House of Commons portcullis in top centre and “From: The Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, OBE, FRS, MP.” above, all in green.
  • 1994-05-??: Letter to Lynda Winston, with House of Lords logo in top centre and “The Rt. Hon. The Lord Wilson of Rievaulx KG, OBE, FRS.”

Alec Douglas-Home

  • 1970-07-29: Letter to Klaus Kuhneumund, with oval House of Commons logo and “From: The Rt. Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, K.T., M.P.” above, all in subtly inconsistent shades of blue.
  • 19??-04-17: Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, with House of Lords logo in top centre and “From: LORD HOME OF THE HIRSEL K.T.” above it. “P.C., J.P., D.L.” left out.

Harold Macmillan

  • 1978-02-22: Letter to Harold Smith, with “From the Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillan” along the top, with “OM FRS” omitted.. There is no parliamentary logo at all as he was not a member of either house at this time.

Edward Heath

  • 1984-05-10: Letter to Felipe González, with portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, M.B.E., M.P.” along the top, all in blue.
  • 1991-02-13: Letter from Heath’s private secretary Robert Vaudry to Sean Bryson with portcullis in top centre and “From: The Private Office of The Rt Hon Edward Heath MBE MP” above it, all in black.
  • 2000-09-18: Letter to the Lady Harmar-Nicholls, with portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Heath, K.G., M.B.E., M.P.” along the top, all in blue.

More recent examples of backbench peers using the royal arms

On a semi-related note, I am still searching for evidence of armorial bearings held by Wilbert Awdry (who, incidentally, died just three days before that Thatcher article was published). Recently I have found some digital uploads of his letterheads, which feature a monochrome photograph of a steam locomotive, identified by the caption as Locomotive No.1 of the Sydney Railway Company. If he wouldn’t use a coat of arms there, where would he?

*The fifty-first Parliament of the United Kingdom was prorogued on Friday 21st March but would not be dissolved until Tuesday 8th April, with polling day on Thursday 1st May.

UPDATE (21st July)

Barely a day after I posted this, technology lawyer and academic Kendra Albert and software engineer Morry Kolman launched Heavyweight, an online letterhead composition tool which allows one to mimic the style of a legal firm. These letterheads are purely textual, so sadly no coats of arms to review.

On Admirals and Arundells

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The Queen turned seventy-eight today. That’s not traditionally considered one of the big birthdays and so commemorations have been fairly muted. The most significant announcement was her appointment as Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom.

The Vice-Admiral is the deputy to the Lord High Admiral, and it may be prudent to recap the outline of that office first: The Lord High Admiral is the ultimate head (originally operational, but later just ceremonial) of the Royal Navy. Appointments have been made since the late fourteenth century in the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, then later Great Britain. Occasionally in Stuart times, and almost permanently from Anne’s reign onwards, the singular office was not filled and instead the post was instead put “In Commission” – i.e. delegated to the Board of Admiralty with the First Lord of the Admiralty (a cabinet minister) as its chair. The creation of the modern Ministry of Defence in 1964 saw the Board with its First Lord dissolved and the title of Lord High Admiral resumed in the person of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2011, on his ninetieth birthday, she conferred the office upon her husband Philip. The status of the office following his death in 2021 is a little ambiguous but the general assumption is that it defaulted back to the sovereign and now resides in King Charles III. I had wondered if Vice-Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence would be appointed on his seventieth birthday this March, but this did not occur. The King perhaps intends to retain the top office for himself and have his wife as runner-up.

The Queen is both the first female and the first royal holder of the office of Vice-Admiral, whose previous recipients have all been career navy men (and indeed tended to hold the actual rank Full Admiral). Her Majesty’s most recent predecessor was the Lord Boyce, who was appointed in 2021 and died in 2022.

Below the Vice-Admiral is another deputy, the Rear-Admiral. This office is currently held by Sir Gordon General, a General in the Royal Marines who was formerly Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff and also served as Lord High Constable at the 2023 coronation.

The Lord High Admiral has a flag of office – a fouled golden anchor on a crimson field. The Queen was presented with a “burgee” (pennant) with a red anchor on a white background when she visited HMNB Devonport. I just about saw Camilla’s impaled banner of arms as well.

On another note, today is also the twentieth anniversary of the death of Sir Edward Heath, Prime Minister 1970-1974. His military career was on land, though he was a noted yachtsman in later life. He stayed in the House of Commons for twenty-seven years after his premiership had ended, which is considerably longer than all his successors combined. He is the most recent Father of the House to have served more than one term, as well as the most recent to have formerly been Prime Minister.* He is also the most recent example of the Order of the Garter being conferred upon an incumbent member of the House of Commons**.

Wikimedia Commons has long had a vector graphic (by Sodacan, of course) of Sir Edward’s shield of arms, but it was only recently that I discovered, through the website of the Heraldry Society, a photograph of the heralds’ illustration of the full achievement. Heath had no offspring, so the arms as a hereditament became extinct.

This anniversary means that Arundells, his house in Salisbury, will now have been his museum for longer than he actually lived there. He bequeathed the building to his namesake charitable foundation who then opened it to the public. There was a fear in 2010 that the house would need to be sold due to high running costs, which then developed into a legal battle, but as of 2025 the estate seems to be running as normal again.

It should be noted that the spelling is Arundells with two Ls, not Arundels with one. Incidentally, it was an Earl of Arundel who is listed as England’s earliest Lord High Admiral, so everything links up I suppose!

*I’m phrasing it that way because Heath is not the most recent Prime Minister to be Father of the House – that was Callaghan.

**I hesitate to say “sitting member” because St George’s Day in 1992 fell in the interlude after the general election (9th April) but before the new Parliament actually assembled (27th April).

Another Condolence Note

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Yesterday the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London attended the memorial at Hyde Park commemorating the London bombings of 7th July 2005.

As with the Auschwitz memorial earlier this year, Sir Keir left a wreath of flowers with a card attached. The card uses the old version of the government arms. I’m guessing the pile of these cards printed during the previous reign has still not been exhausted.

A mere four days earlier, the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Health & Social Care and Chancellor of the Exchequer had visited the Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health Centre, where they spoke from a lectern clearly adorned with the new, Tudor crown, illustration.

I’m afraid I don’t have anything profound to say about the bombing attacks themselves. I had yet to ever visit London in person at the time and my main memory of that month is that of a school assembly in which our headmistress asked pupils what they’d seen on the news and a few had followed the story enough to relay it. I also remember a CBBC drama being made about the event a year later, but that’s about it.

More Crowns, More Confusion

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Recently the office of the Lieutenant Governor of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia released photographs of the erection of a decorative shield on the wall of the Drawing Room at Government House, featuring the cypher of Charles III. Aside from the violation of the rule of tincture (by having a golden cypher on a silver background), I was struck by the fact that it used the Tudor Crown, not the Trudeau Crown as at the federal level.

Photographs from as far back as the coronation in 2023 show that the Tudor Crown was already in use by the provincial government at that time, with the Trudeau Crown nowhere to be seen. Ironically Nova Scotia, as the name and shield both quickly give away, was founded as a Scottish colony long before the Acts of Union and was granted arms by Charles I in his Scottish rather than English capacity, using the Scottish heraldic style with the motto scroll above the shield rather than below. The unicorn supporter even wears the Scottish crown. Perhaps it would have made more sense for the cypher to use that one instead.

It might be prudent at this point to make a note about Canada’s viceregal flags. Until Elizabeth II’s accession all the lieutenant governors used the Union Flag defaced by their heraldic badge on a white circle in the centre. Quebec changed in 1952, using the provincial coat of arm on a large white disk on a plain blue background. The arms are topped by the Tudor crown. It seems the province never adopted St Edward’s Crown despite Elizabeth’s stated preference for it. In the 1980s the other provinces switched to a similar-but-slightly-different design with the shield topped by St Edward’s Crown on a blue background with ten golden maple leaves. As far as I can tell they have not changed over since Charles III’s accession. Nova Scotia was the last holdout with the Union Flag design, only changing over in 2024. This creates the paradox whereby the Scottish and French provinces of Canada are the only ones using the crown design named after an English & Welsh dynasty.

Closer to home, but also wider afield, The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, a charity set up in 2018, announced on Friday that it would be rebranding itself. Anything set up during that reign (or the reigns of previous female sovereigns) with “Queen’s” in the name inevitably had some ambiguity about what would happen in the next one – did “The Queen” mean Elizabeth II personally and permanently, did it mean the incumbent sovereign (in which case it should have become “The King’s” in her son’s reign) or did it mean the incumbent queen whether regnant or consort (in which case it would now belong to Camilla, but in the reign of a king with no wife there might be no namesake at all). The trust has gone with the first option, renaming itself The Queen Elizabeth II Commonwealth Trust and changing its initialism from QCT to QECT. The press release said that existing social media handles would not change, although it didn’t specify if the website’s domain name would do so. Presumably this gives them an excuse not to change St Edward’s Crown to the Tudor Crown in their logo.

Some Heraldic Snippets

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Today the Royal Household released the Sovereign Grant Report. I will discuss the actual substance of it – especially the planned retirement of the royal train – in a later article. For now I will note that the front cover and title page of the report both continue to use the old version of the royal arms with St Edward’s Crown. This was also true of the Birthday Honours published last month in the Gazette.

The Queen opened the Ratho Library in Edinburgh today. She travelled in the newly-acquired BMW G70 (also a topic for a later article) which had her banner flying from the bonnet. It was difficult to get a good look in the footage and the press stills don’t show it at all, but I think I could make out the impalement line, with the dexter side having a yellow top half while the sinister side was white on top and blue on bottom. That would indicate it to be the English marshalling of the royal quarters, surely an armorial faux-pas for an event taking place in the Scottish capital!

The Duke of Edinburgh is in Canada visiting his namesake island and regiment. The royal website’s page on the event depicts his Canadian banner of arms flying in at least one photograph, though again I can’t find it shown in any of the stills on Getty or Alamy.

Also last month another German car manufacturer, Mercedes-Benz, was recognised as a royal warrant-holder. I presume it will be the new Tudor crown illustration that they show, but I haven’t seen any photographs of it yet.

Sealing the Deal

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This is the old one, obviously.

A mere thirty-two months into the New Carolean era, a new Great Seal of the Realm has been unveiled. The design is largely the same as the version made for Elizabeth II in 2001 – the obverse shows the monarch enthroned, the reverse shows the royal armorial achievement (as illustrated by Noad).

Noad’s heraldic drawing is well-known by now. The depiction of Charles on the front* has attracted some criticism: The King is, as at his actual coronation, wearing trousers rather than the more traditional stockings, and his shoes appear to jut out too much. Personally, I think they resemble the feet of 2006-era Cybermen. It is also notable that the crown shown on the monarch’s head is the idealised depiction of the Tudor crown, as opposed to the Imperial State Crown or the Crown of St Edward which he wore at the coronation itself.

The inscription around the outer rim is CHARLES III DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGNORUMQUE SUORIMQUE CETERORUM REX COSORTIONIS POPULARUM PRINCEPS FID DEF.

This is the official Latin equivalent of CHARLES III BY THE GRACE OF GOD OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AND OF HIS OTHER REALMS AND TERRITORIES KING HEAD OF THE COMMONWEALTH DEFENDER OF THE FAITH, and the formulation is similar to that used by British sovereigns for centuries, though even I, eleven years on from having formally studied Latin, can see that it is not a perfectly literal translation.

Judging by the talk pages for both the English and Latin Wikipedias, it is clear I am not the only one to notice this. Britanniarum Regnorum just means “Kingdom of the Britains”** with no specific reference to Hibernia Septentrionalis.

Oddly it seems that the seals used from 1930 to 1953 actually did specify MAG BR and  HIB, short for Magnae Britanniae and Hiberniae as distinct items, but seals used both before and after do not. Uniti does not appear in any of them. The exact name in English of the polity ruling these isles has, of course, gone through many changes due to the evolution of our constitutional arrangements and is very confusing even to natives, but it is interesting to note that the Latin title doesn’t exactly move in step with the English one.

The use of Consortionis Populorum Princeps to mean Head of the Commonwealth of Nations is also a bit odd – “princeps” is of course whence we derive the words “prince” and “principal”, but it originally meant “chief” or “first in rank”. “Consortio Populorum” (“Partnership of the Peoples”?) is probably used because a more literal translation would probably be something more like “Respublica”, but of course in modern English (or British English at any rate), the words commonwealth and republic have diverged almost entirely to where the former means an organisation headed by a monarch and the latter means precisely not that.

Perhaps it is fitting that this event should take place just as a new Pope emerges – we’ll be seeing a lot of official Latin in use very soon!

*The many news articles I have found relating to this story all seem to be nearly word-for-word the same, and none of them identify the portrait artist.
**This is distinct from “King of the Britons”, which would be “Regnum Brittanorum”

On Terence Etherton

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Official parliamentary portrait from 2021 by Roger Harris (CC-BY-3.0)

The Lord Speaker today announced the death of Terence, Lord Etherton.

Etherton only took his seat in the House of Lords in 2021, having recently retired from the office of Master of the Rolls. Aged 73, he was only slightly older than the median for the Upper House, and still below the recently re-raised mandatory judicial retirement age.

Etherton is another of those people whose armorial bearings I know to exist but have never seen: That he received a grant was noted in the College of Arms newsletter no. 65, and a vague description is given on the Birkbeck, University of London website, which is repeated in Joshua Rozenberg’s obituary for him. While we are told that the motto was the Hebrew word הננ (Hineini) – “Here I Am.” we are not given any blazon for the rest of the achievement, only that it features sapphires and a sword.

Etherton’s career in fencing was, of course, also mentioned in the infamous “Enemies of the People” headline published by the Daily Mail in 2016.

I will have to hope that a photograph of the late noble and learned lord’s arms emerges at some point, for he was created too late to appear in the final print edition of Debrett’s Peerage and so it may be impossible to find out in the traditional way.