IMPORTANT NOTE ON TINCTURE-LINES IN SEALS.
My readers would notice at page 52 and again at page 79 that I could not accept the statements that seals so early as 1648-9 could possibly show tincture-lines. I therefore gave my authorities, and showed pretty evidently that I could not, in the face of other facts, accept them. Since the writing of those pages, Mr. W. H. St. John Hope has very kindly examined for me the original document preserved among the muniments at the House of Lords, and reports that in none of the seals attached to the death-warrant of Charles I. are the tinctures indicated by lines. It is not for me to explain how so accurate an observer as the late Mr. Planché made such a mistake. I think it is probable that the late Mr. Bouttell followed him and enlarged somewhat. The fact, however, is now definitively settled.
I had observed that in those earlier printed books which have copper plates, the invention of Father Silvester de Petra Sancta had been very cautiously and undecidedly adopted. In Spelman's Aspilogia [included in that small folio published by Edward Bysse in 1654, and to which I have frequently referred as containing also the works of Nicholas Upton and John de Bado Aureo] most of the shields have tincture lines; but in some of the copper plates, signs of various planets are given instead of those letters for tinctures which are usually seen in "tricks."