Garter Day 2024

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=l_GswdE9bbw

Today saw yet another of the royal public events that were too big to cancel – the procession of the Knights of the Garter to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. As with other big public events, I primarily experienced it in the form of the passive livestream on YouTube.

The cameras followed the knights, heralds and other officers as they marched on foot from the castle to the chapel, then went back again by carriage. They also filmed a large procession of what I assumed to be security cars following along the same stretch of road, which took something away from the splendour of the occasion. The cameras did not go inside the chapel, instead just showing the crowds and guards waiting outside for the duration, but the microphones (wherever the may have been positioned) were able to pick up a reasonable audio feed of the speeches, sermons and hymns.

The new members being installed today were royal lady the Duchess of Gloucester and knights companions the Lords Peach, Kakkar and Lloyd-Webber.

Stall plates and banners as photographed in The Dragon. Artist unknown.

Earlier this year, at the prompting of Baz Manning, I subscribed to The Dragon, the community newsletter of St George’s Chapel. Although this mainly covers religious events, it is also often where knights’ armorial bearings are leaked for the first time. The edition of 9th June included photographs of the newly-delivered stall plates for Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes, while that of 16th June showed the banners of Lords Peach and Kakkar. Apparently Peach’s must have been granted fairly recently, for the article claims that the sword is a reference to him carrying Curtana at the coronation last year. That means Lloyd-Webber is the only current member who remains at present armorially anonymous.

UPDATE (20th June)

The video I originally linked at the top of the article has been removed from Associated Press’s YouTube channel. All the other channels that also uploaded the same video seem to have removed it as well. For now I have replaced it with an amateur video by David Dumbrăveanu. The Daily Mail curiously still seems to have the full video up, and most other channels have at least small snippets.

Reading the Room

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The Queen’s Reading Room today celebrated its second annual festival at Hampton Court Palace.

Rather than focus on the festival event specifically, of which I could not find much footage, I wanted to use the opportunity to write more broadly about the reading room as a concept.

At the start of 2021 Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, launched the reading room under her title as an online book club. In 2023, her husband having acceded to the throne, she reconstituted it as a charity and updated the name to reflect her change in status.1

I had been intrigued by the royal couple’s literary interests since the pandemic forced so much of public interaction into the virtual space, and the bookshelf backdrop became an important element of one’s self-presentation. Conferences held from her study at Birkhall show her with at least three books by J. K. Rowling and six by Philippa Gregory2 — the latter suggesting an unorthodox approach to family history. Charles’s shelf was also the subject of some news articles.

The website contains numerous video interviews with authors, celebrity readings and, of course, a weekly podcast.

The most intriguing part of the enterprise, naturally, is in the particular choice of books: There is a page dedicated to Her Majesty’s own picks, which are named in batches of four every season (i.e. sixteen per year). As of June 2024 there have been fourteen literary seasons, resulting in a list of fifty-six books so far. I have listed them here oldest to newest.

Pride & Prejudice Austen, Jane 1813
Frankenstein Shelley, Mary 1818
A Christmas Carol Dickens, Charles 1843
The Queen’s Necklace Dumas, Alexandre 1849
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens, Charles 1859
The Woman in White Collins, Wilkie 1859
Black Beauty Sewell, Anna 1877
Dracula Stoker, Bram 1897
A Book of Food Shand, P. Morton 1927
Rebecca Maurier, Daphne du 1938
I Capture the Castle Smith, Dodie 1948
My Family and Other Animals Durrell, Gerald 1956
Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris Gallico, Paul 1958
The Far Pavilions Kaye, M. M. 1978
War Horse Morpurgo, Michael 1982
Love in the Time of Cholera Márquez, Gabriel García 1988
The Remains of the Day Ishiguro, Kazuo 1989
The Light Years Howard, Elizabeth Jane 1990
A Suitable Boy Seth, Vikram 1993
Charlotte Gray Faulks, Sebastian 1998
The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver, Barbara 1998
Atonement McEwan, Ian 2001
The Secret Life of Bees Kidd, Sue Monk 2001
The Kite Runner Hasseini Khaled 2003
Suite Française Némirovsky, Irène 2004
The Various Haunts of Men Hill, Susan 2004
Labyrinth Mosse, Kate 2005
The Island Hislop, Victoria 2005
Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2006
Restless Boyd, William 2006
The Book Thief Zusak, Marcus 2006
The Lords’ Day Dobbs, Michael 2007
The Year of Eating Dangerously Parker Bowles, Tom 2007
My Brilliant Friend Ferrante, Elena 2012
The Architect’s Apprentice Shafak, Elif 2013
The Red Notebook Laurain, Antoine 2015
A Gentleman in Moscow Towles, Amor 2016
Magpie Murders Horowitz, Anthony 2016
The Little Library Cookbook Young, Kate 2017
Where the Crawdads Sing Owens, Delia 2018
City of Girls Gilbert, Elizabeth 2019
Girl O’Brien, Edna 2019
Girl, Woman, Other Evaristo, Bernadine 2019
Lady in Waiting Glenconner, Anne, Baroness 2019
The Secret Commonwealth Pullman, Philip 2019
A Half Baked Idea Potts, Olivia 2020
Dark Tides Gregory, Philippa 2020
Hamnet O’Farrell, Maggie 2020
Miss Benson’s Beetle Joyce, Rachel 2020
The Mirror & the Light Mantel, Hilary 2020
Great Circle Shipstead, Maggie 2021
Left You Dead James, Peter 2021
The Fair Botanists Sheridan, Sara 2021
The Paper Palace Heller, Miranda Cowley 2021
Lessons in Chemistry Garmus, Bonnie 2022
The Whalebone Theatre Quinn, Joanna 2022

The selection skews modern. While there are some obvious classics in there (e.g. Dickens and Austen) the majority of entries are from the present century. In this long list the only one which I personally recall reading in full is The Book Thief, about eleven years ago. Fittingly enough, that story is itself about the importance of literacy for intellectual development and freedom, in the context of living through World War II under the German regime that encouraged book-burning.

There are many others from which I have at least read extracts (or listened to them in audiobooks) or which I know by reputation.

The one which sticks out to me the most, given the regal patronage of the Reading Room is The Lords’ Day (2007) by Michael Dobbs. This is a political thriller about the Palace of Westminster being captured by terrorists on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, with fictionalised versions of Elizabeth II and her then-Prince of Wales among the characters. Dobbs (himself ennobled in 2010) earlier wrote the famous House of Cards/To Play the King/The Final Cut trilogy whose second instalment also features a fictionalised version of Charles — ascending to the throne thirty years earlier than in real life and then swiftly being forced to abdicate after a losing a constitutional battle against an evil prime minister. Also featured is Lady in Waiting (2019) by the Lady Glenconner (which I bought at a charity shop last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet), a memoir which goes into great detail about her time with the Princess Margaret.

The historical novels also often touch on potentially-sensitive topics: e.g. Dumas’s The Queen’s Necklace and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities both centre on the French Revolution while Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow deals with the Russian one. Seth and Kaye both write about British India, Kingsolver about the Belgian Congo. It would be hard to find a set of popular historical books set in Britain (whether fictional or factual) without encountering at least one about the royal family themselves. In this case Her Majesty chose Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about the career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. There are quite a lot more books about Word War II as well.

The King also gets a look-in. Before his accession to the throne, the Prince Charles shared five of his favourite books: The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby, Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, Lustrum by Robert Harris, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn and Napoleon by Adam Zamoyski. That second book is likely particularly important to Charles, given his attempts to live that life himself.

There is a further section dealing specifically with children’s books, figureheaded by the Princess of Wales.3 On World Book Day 2022 Catherine similarly made five personal recommendations, and there are dozens more recommended by other friends of the charity. The proportion of these which I have personally read is higher than in the adult section but there are fewer interesting points I have to make about them.

It is also worth noting that while quite a few of the entries end up being about the royal family, there are so far as I can tell none of the books by them e.g. A Vision of Britain, The Old Man of Lochnagar, Crowned in a Far Country or Budgie the Little Helicopter. The Queen did, however, recommend one book by her non-royal son.

I daresay that Her Majesty is at times being a little, well, courageous in associating herself with some of these books. The monarchy strives to be above politics, yet literature is fundamentally about ideas and politics are never far away. A reading room project which took a wide berth from any possible controversy would probably end to watered-down to be worth doing, so Camilla has taken the riskier but more rewarding path. This was exemplified by her Clarence House speech in 2023 for the relaunch of the project, at which she told writers collectively to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination” in what was widely perceived as an intervention in an ongoing controversy over the proposed Bowdlerisation of some classic Roald Dahl books. The edits ultimately did not go ahead.

FURTHER READING

UPDATE (June 2025)

I originally meant the title of this post to be a weak pun on the project’s actual name, but lately I have discovered that there actually is a newly-launched podcast called Reading the Room.

UPDATE (October 2025)

The Queen has, reportedly, gotten herself included in The Hawk is Dead, an upcoming crime novel by Peter James.

FOOTNOTES

1 It went straight from “The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room” to “The Queen’s Reading Room” without being called “The Queen Consort’s Reading Room” in between, perhaps the earliest hint at the eventual abandonment of this honorific crutch at the coronation.

2 I can’t get a perfect view even in 1080p, but I think I recognised The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter and Three Sisters, Three Queens. What Camilla chose for the above list, however, was Dark Tides, one of the non-royal Fairmile series.

3 Catherine’s URL slug has been updated for the new reign but Charles’s has not, giving the impression that they are husband and wife instead of father and daughter-in-law.

The Proclamation in Public

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Yesterday I wrote about the text of the royal proclamation for the dissolution of Parliament appearing on the Privy Council website. Today it was actually read out in public.

Traditionally there are two public readings of the proclamation – the first is by the Common Cryer of the City of London (Major Peter Oweh, his first time doing this) on the steps of the Royal Exchange, the second is by the Lord Lyon King of Arms (Canon Joseph Morrow, now on his fourth general election) from the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.

As with many ceremonial events like this it has been frustratingly difficult to find good visual recording – despite most big news outlets doing rolling coverage of the general election for the past few days. The London proclamation was filmed by The Daily Mirror as seen above and had a few still photographs taken by Getty. For the Edinburgh version I am limited to the Lyon Court’s own blog and this amateur video by Haizhen’s Hut. To make matters worse, the United Kingdom is far from the only country having a national general election this year and even just searching for “dissolution of parliament” often brings up articles about Israel.

Yesterday I received a campaign letter from the Conservative candidate for Beverley & Holderness, Rt Hon Graham Stuart. Cannily, I would presume, he had them printed and sent out on 29th May so that at time of writing he could still use the MP post-nominals on the return address of the envelope, even though he would cease to be one by the time most recipients of his letter actually read it. Electoral projections that I can find at this time are conflicted as to whether he will be returned or replaced by the Labour candidate Margaret Pinder.

Also of note are the writs of election, which of course the Lord High Chancellor has as per said proclamation caused to be issued. Medway Council recently published a photograph of the writs for the three constituencies for which it was responsible. These are, of course, the first writs for these constituencies to be issued in the name of Charles the Third.

That brings me on to another point – while dissolving Parliament is a routine part of the election process in many democratic countries, the return of the regnal name Charles in relation to such matters provokes some historical sniggering in reminiscence of the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It is curious, therefore, that the first British dissolution in this reign should be immediately after Oak Apple Day, the now-obscure commemoration of the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of Cromwell’s republic. The name refers to the Royal Oak, a tree in Boscobel Wood which Charles II used to hide from the Roundheads in 1651. Given that the oak tree went on to become the symbol of the Conservative Party, it is perhaps a little surprising that no senior figures in the party (or in the headline-hungry media) have made a prominent reference to it. Of course, once suspects that his present Majesty would prefer not to be drawn into partisanship in that way.

Comparing Dissolution Proclamations

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The Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom is no more. It dissolved just after midnight… or did it?

Parliament’s own website and guidance documents seem to indicate that dissolution took effect at 00:01 today, but I doubt the factual accuracy of this and I am not the only one.

I spent much of today keeping a close eye on the Privy Council website to see when there would be an update about today’s meeting. It arrived sometime before 13:00. The PDF records that His Majesty ordered the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal of the Realm to the proclamation, and also (alongside the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) to arrange the issuance of writs of summons and election. The text of the proclamation itself is reproduced below:

Whereas We have thought fit, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, to dissolve this
present Parliament, which stands prorogued to Friday, the thirty-first day of May: We do, for
that End, publish this Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby dissolve the said Parliament
accordingly: And the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Members of the House of
Commons, are discharged from further Attendance thereat: And We being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in Parliament, do
hereby make known to all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new
Parliament: and do hereby further declare, that, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council,
We have given Order that Our Chancellor of Great Britain and Our Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland do respectively, upon Notice thereof, forthwith, issue out Writs, in due Form
and according to Law, for calling a new Parliament: And We do hereby also, by this Our
Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm, require Writs forthwith to be issued
accordingly by Our said Chancellor and Secretary of State respectively, for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly
returned to, and give their Attendance in, Our said Parliament on Tuesday, the ninth day of
July next, which Writs are to be returnable in due course of Law.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of May in the Year of our Lord
two thousand and twenty four and in the second year of Our Reign.

The Privy Council website does not give texts like these for 2010 and earlier, but sound recordings of those earlier occasions confirm that the same wording was in use. The most notable feature of these proclamations is that they specify dissolution taking place immediately upon the date given and also fix the date for the new parliament to assemble, but don’t actually say when polling day will be.

The FTPA Era

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 substantially altered the mechanics of British general elections. No longer could the sitting prime minister simply “go to the country” whenever he pleased, instead the date of the general election would be fixed as the first Thursday in May in the fifth year since the previous general election, unless two thirds of the House of Commons voted to have one earlier. Dissolution of the outgoing legislature would occur automatically twenty-five working days before polling.

In a moment of supreme constitutional pettiness, the act even transferred the authority for writs of election for MPs (though curiously not writs of summons for peers) to the Lord Chancellor and Northern Ireland Secretary to act without the monarch’s instruction, so that this element was taken out of the proclamation.

Three general elections occurred while the FTPA was in force – the fifty-fifth Parliament was allowed to run its natural course, the fifty-sixth was dissolved early by the two thirds motion and the fifty-seventh by a special act of its own passage. Despite these very different constitutional circumstances, the proclamations in all cases were identical (save of course the specific dates mentioned). Below is the text of the proclamation from 2019:

Whereas We, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in
Parliament, do publish this, Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby make known to
all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new Parliament to be
holden at Westminster on Tuesday the seventeenth day of December next: And We do
hereby also, by this Our Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm,
require Writs to be issued by Our Lord High Chancellor for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal who are to serve in the said Parliament to give their
Attendance in Our said Parliament on the said date.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this sixth day of November in the Year of
our Lord two thousand and nineteen and in the sixty-eighth year of Our Reign.

The 2017 version can be read here, and that of 2015 heard here. The 2017 election also had a different proclamation nine days earlier to appoint the polling date, though this proclamation did not enjoy any of the latter’s accompanying ceremony despite clearly being the more politically important of the two.

As you can see, this version of the proclamation is a pathetic sliver of its former self – the issuance of writs refers entirely to the House of Lords and thus doesn’t actually say anything to the general public about participating in an election. The only substantive agency which Her Majesty retained was in choosing the date on which the new Parliament met – and per the other provisions of the FTPA this no longer had any knock-on effect for subsequent elections. Even the name was changed – it became simply “A Proclamation for declaring the calling of a new Parliament” instead of “A Proclamation for dissolving the present Parliament and declaring the calling of another”.

Changes in Procedure

Although it may seem a question of semantics, there is an important difference in the sequence of events between FTPA-era elections and earlier ones: Traditional practice involves a proclamation to dissolve Parliament with immediate effect, then an election happening a certain time after that. FTPA practice was for the election date to be fixed far in advance (whether by the other type of proclamation or by statute) and dissolution would happen a certain number of days before that. In the old system a privy council comprising incumbent parliamentarians would convene to cause their own dissolution and the other matters connected, whereas in under the FTPA they would meet to arrange the other matters several hours after dissolution had already occurred.

That brings us to the key point of this article – the time of day at which dissolution actually takes effect: With the FTPA in place and thus the dissolution date pre-ordained without the need for further action, it was logical to treat it as happening as soon as that date arrived*, which would also have been the case under the old system if a Parliament had been allowed to run its full course. When Parliament is being dissolved by a specific proclamation for that purpose, then it obviously must stay in existence until the proclamation is actually produced – and it is rare for a privy council to be convened at midnight. None of the proclamations specified delaying their effects until the end of the date, and obviously they cannot be retroactive to the beginning of the date because, as mentioned in the previous post, there have been instances of Parliaments still sitting earlier on the same date as that on which they would be dissolved, and retroactive dissolution would have meant that the sitting (including any acts passed and royal assents given thereat) was invalid.

In today’s example, the fifty-eighth Parliament had already been prorogued from 24th May to 31st, but until the privy council held around noon there had been nothing in law to cause it to dissolve, and its natural expiration was still many months away. If Sunak’s government had suddenly gotten cold feet about calling an election, or if His Majesty was somehow prevented from attending (for the sake of the hypothetical let us assume he could not arrange any counsellors of state to be there either) and thus the meeting to approve the proclamation had not gone ahead, then Parliament would have remained in existence and reconvened the next day for the beginning of a fifth session.

Given that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act with the explicit intention to revert to pre-2011 procedure as far as possible, it does not make sense for parliamentary authorities to declare in their guidance and press briefings that the legislature had dissolved many hours before any such thing had actually taken place. The most logical explanation (pending further research) that comes to mind is that that the guidance was written during the 2011-22 period and not updated thereafter, so that the FTPA mentality remains in force even though the law itself does not.

This whole business also caused some difficulty for me as a Wikipedia editor, since I noticed upon rising this morning that another editor had, just after midnight, already changed the tense of my disclaimer flairs on the biographies of still-current MPs. I reverted the change and did not set it forward again until many hours later when I had actually seen the proclamation published online. In all fairness the other editor was merely following reliable sources as we are bound to do. Unfortunately this goes to show that there are many times when the reliable sources can still get things wrong.

*There is a secondary deliberation as to whether this means exactly midnight or, to avoid ambiguity, one minute later. I will not quibble with that particular question here as it does not affect the primary matter I am discussing.

UPDATE (May 2024)

David Torrance has produced a research briefing for the House of Commons Library. Page 7 cites this post and states that “This timing was intended for operational purposes rather than as a statement of the legal position.” with page 10 confirming that the actual dissolution occurred at 11:57am with the application of the Great Seal to the proclamation.

Washing Up, Washing Out

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Yesterday evening the fifty-eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom was prorogued for the fourth and final time, pending dissolution next Thursday. This meant that MPs had just two days of “wash up” in which any bills already in the pipeline are either hurried to completion or abandoned altogether.

Parliament is not always prorogued before dissolution, sometime it is merely adjourned – in the past fifty years the 46th, 47th, 48th, 49th, 52nd, 53rd and 57th parliaments were all open-ended. Irrespective of whether or not a prorogation was involved, the time elapsed between a parliament’s last sitting day and its dissolution varies highly: For the second general election of 1974 it seems that the 46th Parliament sat last on 31st July before rising for the summer recess then got dissolved on 20th September just before it could convene again, whereas in 1992 the 50th Parliament sat last and was dissolved on the same day.*

Rishi Sunak’s motivation for this particular timetable is unclear – if he had let the legislature sit on 28th and 29th May it would have allowed four days instead of two to finish business, so that fewer bills would have needed to be dropped. Perhaps Sunak felt it would be a waste of commuting time to sit for just two days between the bank holiday and the dissolution. Some have also speculated that he wanted Parliament closed as soon as possible to reduce the opportunity for his backbenchers to unseat him as party leader. A precedent might be found in John Major in 1997, who had the 51st Parliament prorogued more than a fortnight before it was dissolved and was suspected of doing so to block the publication of a select committee report against Neil Hamilton.

When a general election is looming, incumbent MPs have to make a decision: Step down and make one’s valedictory speech in the chamber before prorogation, or stand again and risk having to make it instead from the returning officer’s podium in the early hours after polls close. By the time the house closed more than a hundred members (over seventy of them Conservatives) had chosen the first option. The valedictory debate lasted nearly seven hours and obviously I have not yet been able to properly take in all of the speeches. So far my favourites were Sir James Duddridge (with its interventions by both Alicia Kearns and Dame Eleanor Laing), Julian Knight (who took the chance to lash out at former colleagues who had wronged him) and Tim Loughton (differentiating knowledge from wisdom in terms of putting tomatoes in fruit salads).

The prorogation ceremony was carried out in the usual way. There were two substitutions among the Lords Commissioners – Liberal Democrat leader Lord Newby was replaced by his deputy Lord Dholakia (as in 2019) while Convenor of the Crossbench peers Lord Kinnoull (still not a privy council member) stayed on the crossbenches and left his place on the woolsack to his predecessor-but-two Lord Laming. Eleven acts received assent.

As in the prorogation last November, the letters patent acknowledged that there had been a demise of the crown since the last general election, hence the phrase

…whereas Queen Elizabeth The Second did lately for divers difficult and pressing affairs concerning Us the State and defence of Our United Kingdom and Church ordain this Our present Parliament to begin and be holden at Our City of Westminster the seventeenth day of December in the sixty-eighth year of Her Reign on which day Our said Parliament was begun and holden and is there now holden…

which as Jack Blackburn of The Times aptly pointed out is the last time that the former monarch will be mentioned in Parliament in this context.

As I have mentioned before, the dissolution of Parliament creates a headache for Wikipedia editors as hundreds of people who for years or even were incumbent members of the House of Commons cease to be so for a matter of weeks, then (most of them) become so again after polling day. This time, rather than have many of us hurriedly scouring hundreds of pages to remove any trace of incumbency, I am trialing a solution I piloted at the devolved elections three years ago by placing a disclaimer tag at the top of each affected article. The beauty of this trick is that the template can be centrally edited, so I can go at a more leisurely pace adding it to MPs’ articles in the days before dissolution with the notice written in future tense and then on the day of dissolution change it to present tense. Of course, that still leaves a lot of work making long-term edits to the pages of those members who will permanently leave the house at this election (whether willingly or not) and creating new pages for their successors.

EXTERNAL LINKS

House of Commons Library

Privy Council Office

UPDATE (2nd June)

When looking through the Hansard records for this sitting, I noticed an interesting mistake:

End of the Fifth Session (opened on 7 November 2023) of the Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the Second Year of the Reign of His Majesty King Charles the Third.

The last sitting day before 7th November 2023 was 26th October, and the record for that day says it was the end of the third session. Quite when the fourth session came and went I have no idea.

*The 1993 documentary Days of Majesty covers the prorogation and dissolution process.

Calling it a day

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Today, after many months of speculation, the Prime Minister announced that a parliamentary general election will be held on Thursday 4th July. In advance of this the current fifty-eighth parliament will be prorogued on 24th May and dissolved on 30th May. Sunak had previously said that the general election would be “in the second half of 2024”. This date just barely qualifies, being the 186th day out of 366. Some ministers had hinted at a “working assumption” that the election would be in October.

This is the first time a prime minister has been able to “call an election” in this manner since Gordon Brown in 2010, with those in between being constrained by the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, which was finally repealed in 2022. This timing means that it is obviously not a “snap” election like those of 2017 and 2019, but also doesn’t have quite as long a build-up as those of 2010 and 2015.

One consequence of having the campaign period throughout the month of June is that the royal family, as per tradition, will postpone any high-profile events from that period to avoid distracting attention from the politicians. Exactly how many events will be rescheduled is not yet confirmed: It has been said that the 80th anniversary D-Day commemorations will be going ahead as planned, but no word yet on the timing of Trooping the Colour, Garter Day or the King’s Birthday Honours.

This election will also be the first since 2010 to see significant boundary reforms enacted. My own constituency of Beverly & Holderness will be slightly reduced in size, the North Holderness Ward being transferred to the new seat of Bridlington & the Wolds.

A Proliferation of Signs: Badges in the Medieval World

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It has been a while since I attended any virtual events by the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada. Today’s was rather different in style to the ones I remember during the COVID years.

The speaker was Ann Marie Rasmussen, Professor and Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her lecture was divided into three parts.

Badges are small devices found mainly in north west Europe. They were easy and cheap to make, usually from pewter in moulds carved from stone. We have an example of a surviving stone mould in Mont-Saint-Michel showing the image of St Michael slaying the dragon. Pewter can show fine details well, but it has the weakness of tarnishing easily. Currently there are more than twenty-thousand medieval badges surviving in museums, and during the middle ages there were probably more than a million in existence. Badges were designed to be decoded. Pilgrim badges were one type, made and sold at holy sites showing religious imagery (e.g. one from Canterbury shows Thomas Becket, one from the Vatican shows crossed keys with a tiara). There survives an anonymous painting of Christ himself among the pilgrims, all of them wearing badges.

Almost all retainers and employees would have a badge to show the identity of the lord, household or organisation for which they worked. There are even examples of badges made of children’s toys. A 1432 portrait of the poet Oswald von Wolkenstein shows him wearing a badge of a dragon and griffin.

The separation of the spiritual and temporal realms is a modern idea. The types of badges often crossed over. Not all imagery was reverential – there are some humourous ones designed to resemble unsightly body parts, and there are records from medieval times of people complaining about indecent badges being worn and distributed around festival times.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (June 13th)

The Society has uploaded the lecture to its YouTube channel, so I am spared from writing out a long description of its contents.

Honour in the Eyes of Others

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The Oxford University Heraldry Society’s May lecture was given by Vicky Fletcher. It was a study of pseudo-heraldic shield motifs in historic church graffiti and medieval personal seals. She began by confessing that she was not a heraldic expert, and so “heraldic” was here used in a broader than usual sense.

The idea of chivalric knighthood was significant in the late middle ages. Heraldry was a free-for-all until Richard III gave a charter to the College of Arms in 1484. Large amounts of land became available during the reign of Edward III due to, among other factors, population disruption from plague and famine. Labourers could demand higher wages and much arable land was converted to pastoral. New landowners used heraldry to bolster their social status. This was the age of the burgeoning “middling sort”.

Her in-depth study was of All Saints Church in Worlington, Suffolk. The parish church was the centre of medieval life, although the new rich were also prone to establishing private chapels. All Saints Church would be one of the first buildings encountered by people who arrived from the river. Fletcher had looked in depth at the many motifs carved into the church’s walls but decided to confine herself to those which were shield-shaped. There were an estimated 390 inscriptions were found in the church, of which around 10% were heraldic in nature.

Heraldic graffiti was mainly clustered around four of six piers in the south arcade. Motifs do not cut across each other and defacement is rare, though a lot of it would have been whitewashed during the Reformation and then clumsily scraped off by the Victorians. The most common motifs were the bend, the chevron and the quarter (which in Fletcher’s terms included crosses and saltires).

There are many prominent examples of the arms of Jerusalem, probably used by returning pilgrims. Peasant rebels in Richard II’s time used the arms of St George. Heraldic symbols were widely used by merchants. There were also “personal seals” used by individuals in a private capacity. Peasants who rose in status might want to disguise their low ancestry to escape the notice of their former masters (and thus avoid having to pay tax to them).

A link to the full paper can be found here.

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.

While I’m here, there is another aspect of the coronation on which I’d like to look back – the status of the chairs on which Their Majesties sat during the ceremony. Some weeks before the event the antiquarian Dr Allan Barton put out a video called When Is a Chair a Throne? The answer, essentially, is that it must be on some form of dais to raise it above the floor.

At the business end of the abbey during the coronation there are five seats of special importance: Closest to the alter is St Edward’s Chair, the ancient wooden relic on which the monarch is actually crowned. A few metres behind, in the crossing, sit two “throne chairs”, in this case a pair of X-framed armchairs (almost looking like something a film director would use) originally made for George VI & Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Perpendicular to these are chairs of estate, these ones originally made for Elizabeth II and Philip Mountbatten, allowing the couple to sit behind their respective faldstools.

From what I can see in images of past coronations, both painted and photographic, a pattern is clear – the consort’s throne sits on three steps and the monarch’s throne on five, while the chairs of estate and St Edward’s chair sit directly on the floor. The 2023 coronation breaks the trend – the monarch’s X-framed chair has just one block underneath it while the consort’s counterpart has none at all (though it still has upholstered footstools in front). Does this mean that, technically, only one of these chairs counts as a throne?

IMAGE REFERENCES

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…