John Gough Nichols.
"Christus purpureum gemmati textus in auro
Signabat Labarum, Clypeorum insignia Christus
Scripserat; ardebat summis crux addita cristis."
By the same sort of reasoning—viz. conjecture—that Mr. John Gough Nichols adheres to the opinion that the Collar of SS. takes its name from the word Seneschallus, it might be contended that the initial letters of the lines above quoted mystically stand for "Collar, S. S." Enough, however, has already been written on this unmeaning point to show that some of us are "great gowks," or, in other words, stupid guffs, to waste so much pen, ink, and paper on the subject.
There are other topics, however, connected with the Collar of SS. which are of real interest to a
numerous section of the titled aristocracy in the United Kingdom; and it is with these, as bearing upon the heraldic and gentilitial rights of the subject, that I am desirous to grapple. Mr. Nichols, and those who pin faith upon his dicta, hold that the Collar of SS. was a livery ensign bestowed by our kings upon certain of their retainers, in much the same sense and fashion as Cedric the Saxon is said to have given a collar to Wamba, the son of Witless. For myself, and all those entitled to carry armorial bearings in the kingdom, I repudiate the notion that the knightly golden Collar of SS. was ever so conferred or received. Further, I maintain that there was a distinction between what Mr. Nichols calls "the Livery Collar of SS.," and the said knightly golden Collar of SS., as marked and broad as is the difference between the Collar of the Garter and the collar of that four-footed dignitary which bore the inscription,
"I am the Prince's Dog at Kew,
Pray whose Dog are you?"
In his last communication Mr. Nichols lays it down that "livery collars were perfectly distinct from collars of knighthood;" adding, they did not exist until a subsequent age. Of course the collars of such royal orders of knighthood as have been established since the days of our Lancastrian kings had necessarily no existence at the period to which he refers. But Gough (not Mr. Gough Nichols) mentions that the Collar of SS. was upon the monument of Matilda Fitzwalter, of Dunmow, who lived in the reign of King John; and Ashmole instances a monument in the collegiate church at Warwick, with the portraiture of Margaret, wife of Sir William Peito, said to have been sculptured there in the reign of Edward III. What credit then are we to attach to Mr. N.'s averment, that the "Collar of Esses was not a badge of knighthood, nor a badge of personal merit, but was a collar of livery, and the idea typified by livery was feudal dependence, or what we now call party?" What sort of feudal dependence was typified by the ensign of equestrian nobility upon the necks of the two ladies named, or upon the neck of Queen Joan of Navarre? Mr. Nichols states that in the first Lancastrian reigns the Collar of SS. had no pendant, though, afterwards, it had a pendant called "the king's beast." On the effigy of Queen Joan the collar certainly has no pendant, except the jewelled ring of a trefoil form. But on the ceiling and canopy of the tomb of Henry IV., his arms, and those of his queen (Joan of Navarre), are surrounded with Collars of SS., the king's terminating in an eagle volant (rather an odd sort of a beast), whilst the pendant of the queen's has been defaced.