Modern Heraldry.—With the accession of the Tudors armory began a rapid decadence. Heraldry ceased to play its part in military affairs, the badges and banners under which the medieval noble’s retinue came into the field were banished, and even the tournament in its later days became a renascence pageant which did not need the painted shield and armorial trappers. Treatises on armory had been rare in the days before the printing press, but even so early a writer as Nicholas Upton had shown himself as it were unconcerned with the heraldry that any man might see in the camp and the street. From the Book of St Albans onward the treatises on armory are informed with a pedantry which touches the point of crazy mysticism in such volumes as that of Sylvanus Morgan. Thus came into the books those long lists of “diminutions of ordinaries,” the closets and escarpes, the endorses and ribands, the many scores of strange crosses and such wild fancies as the rule, based on an early German pedantry, that the tinctures in peers shields should be given the names of precious stones and those in the shields of sovereigns the names of planets. Blazon became cumbered with that vocabulary whose French of Stratford atte Bowe has driven serious students from a business which, to use a phrase as true as it is hackneyed, was at last “abandoned to the coachpainter and the undertaker.”
With the false genealogy came in the assumption or assigning of shields to which the new bearers had often no better claim than lay in a surname resembling that of the original owner. The ancient system of differencing arms disappeared. Now and again we see a second son obeying the book-rules and putting a crescent in his shield or a third son displaying a molet, but long before our own times the practice was disregarded, and the most remote kinsman of a gentle house displayed the “whole coat” of the head of his family.
The art of armory had no better fate. An absurd rule current for some three hundred years has ordered that the helms of princes and knights should be painted full-faced and those of peers and gentlemen sidelong. Obeying this, the herald painters have displayed the crests of knights and princes as sideways upon a full-faced helm; the torse or wreath, instead of being twisted about the brow of the helm, has become a sausage-shaped bar see-sawing above the helm; and upon this will be balanced a crest which might puzzle the ancient craftsman to mould in his leather or parchment. A ship on a lee-shore with a thunderstorm lowering above its masts may stand as an example of such devices. “Tastes, of course, differ,” wrote Dr Woodward, “but the writer can hardly think that the épergne given to Lieut.-General Smith by his friends at Bombay was a fitting ornament for a helmet.” As with the crest, so with the shield. It became crowded with ill-balanced figures devised by those who despised and ignored the ancient examples whose painters had followed instinctively a simple and pleasant convention. Landscapes and seascapes, musical lines, military medals and corrugated boiler-flues have all made their appearance in the shield. Even as on the signs of public houses, written words have taken the place of figures, and the often-cited arms exemplified to the first Earl Nelson marked, it may be hoped, the high watermark of these distressing modernisms. Of late years, indeed, official armory in England has shown a disposition to follow the lessons of the archaeologist, although the recovery of medieval use has not yet been as successful as in Germany, where for a long generation a school of vigorous armorial art has flourished.
Officers of Arms.—Officers of arms, styled kings of arms, heralds and pursuivants, appear at an early period of the history of armory as the messengers in peace and war of princes and magnates. It is probable that from the first they bore in some wise their lord’s arms as the badge of their office. In the 14th century we have heralds with the arms on a short mantle, witness the figure of the duke of Gelderland’s herald painted in the Armorial de Gelre. The title of Blue Mantle pursuivant, as old as the reign of Edward III., suggests a like usage in England. When the tight-laced coat of arms went out of fashion among the knighthood the loose tabard of arms with its wide sleeves was at once taken in England as the armorial dress of both herald and cavalier, and the fashion of it has changed but little since those days. Clad in such a coat the herald was the image of his master and, although he himself was rarely chosen from any rank above that of the lesser gentry, his person, as a messenger, acquired an almost priestly sacredness. To injure or to insult him was to affront the coat that he wore.
We hear of kings of arms in the royal household of the 13th century, and we may compare their title with those of such officers as the King of the Ribalds and the King of the Minstrels; but it is noteworthy that, even in modern warrants for heralds’ patents, the custom of the reign of Edward III. is still cited as giving the necessary precedents for the officers’ liveries. Officers of arms took their titles from their provinces or from the titles and badges of their masters. Thus we have Garter, Norroy and Clarenceux, March, Lancaster, Windsor, Leicester, Leopard, Falcon and Blanc Sanglier as officers attached to the royal house; Chandos, the herald of the great Sir John Chandos; Vert Eagle of the Nevill earls of Salisbury, Esperance and Crescent of the Percys of Northumberland. The spirit of Henry VII.’s legislation was against such usages in baronial houses, and in the age of the Tudors the last of the private heralds disappears.
In England the royal officers of arms were made a corporation by Richard III. Nowadays the members of this corporation, known as the College of Arms or Heralds’ College, are Garter Principal King of Arms, Clarenceux King of Arms South of Trent, Norroy King of Arms North of Trent, the heralds Windsor, Chester, Richmond, Somerset, York and Lancaster, and the pursuivants Rouge Croix, Bluemantle, Rouge Dragon and Portcullis. Another king of arms, not a member of this corporation, has been attached to the order of the Bath since the reign of George I., and an officer of arms, without a title, attends the order of St Michael and St George.
There is no college or corporation of heralds in Scotland or Ireland. In Scotland “Lyon-king-of-arms,” “Lyon rex armorum,” or “Leo fecialis,” so called from the lion on the royal shield, is the head of the office of arms. When first the dignity was constituted is not known, but Lyon was a prominent figure in the coronation of Robert II. in 1371. The office was at first, as in England, attached to the earl marshal, but it has long been conferred by patent under the great seal, and is held direct from the crown. Lyon is also king-of-arms for the national order of the Thistle. He is styled “Lord Lyon,” and the office has always been held by men of family, and frequently by a peer who would appoint a “Lyon depute.” He is supreme in all matters of heraldry in Scotland. Besides the “Lyon depute,” there are the Scottish heralds, Albany, Ross and Rothesay, with precedence according to date of appointment; and the pursuivants, Carrick, March and Unicorn. Heralds and pursuivants are appointed by Lyon.
In Ireland also there is but one king-of-arms, Ulster. The office was instituted by Edward VI. in 1553. The patent is given by Rymer, and refers to certain emoluments as “praedicto officio ... ab antiquo spectantibus.” The allusion is to an Ireland king-of-arms mentioned in the reign of Richard II. and superseded by Ulster. Ulster holds office by patent, during pleasure; under him the Irish office of arms consists of two heralds, Cork and Dublin; and a pursuivant, Athlone. Ulster is king-of-arms to the order of St Patrick. He held visitations in parts of Ireland from 1568 to 1620, and these and other records, including all grants of arms from the institution of the office, are kept in the Birmingham Tower, Dublin.
The armorial duties of the ancient heralds are not clearly defined. The patent of Edward IV., creating John Wrythe king of arms of England with the style of Garter, speaks vaguely of the care of the office of arms and those things which belong to that office. We know that the heralds had their part in the ordering of tournaments, wherein armory played its greatest part, and that their expert knowledge of arms gave them such duties as reckoning the noble slain on a battlefield. But it is not until the 15th century that we find the heralds following a recognized practice of granting or assigning arms, a practice on which John of Guildford comments, saying that such arms given by a herald are not of greater authority than those which a man has taken for himself. The Book of St Albans, put forth in 1486, speaking of arms granted by princes and lords, is careful to add that “armys bi a mannys proper auctorite take, if an other man have not borne theym afore, be of strength enogh,” repeating, as it seems, Nicholas Upton’s opinion which, in this matter, does not conflict with the practice of his day. It is probable that the earlier grants of arms by heralds were made by reason of persons uncunning in armorial lore applying for a suitable device to experts in such matters—and that such setting forth of arms may have been practised even in the 14th century.
The earliest known grants of arms in England by sovereigns or private persons are, as a rule, the conveyance of a right in a coat of arms already existing or of a differenced version of it. Thus in 1391 Thomas Grendale, a squire who had inherited through his grandmother the right in the shield of Beaumeys, granted his right in it to Sir William Moigne, a knight who seems to have acquired the whole or part of the Beaumeys manor in Sawtry. Under Henry VI. we have certain rare and curious letters of the crown granting nobility with arms “in signum hujusmodi nobilitatis” to certain individuals, some, and perhaps all of whom, were foreigners who may have asked for letters which followed a continental usage. After this time we have a regular series of grants by heralds who in later times began to assert that new arms, to be valid, must necessarily be derived from their assignments, although ancient use continued to be recognized.