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hidden corners
HERALDRY
GENEALOGY David Gelber examines the Library’s collections of books on these unexpectedly fascinating subjects, and explores how heraldry in particular exposes the social aspirations and vain fantasies of the British since the Elizabethan period
‘
he science of fools with long memories’ is how Voltaire caricatured the study of heraldry. For him and other Enlightenment savants, a preoccupation with the abstractions and punctilios of blazon represented all that was irrational, vain and superfluous about the ancien régime. Yet Voltaire’s aphorism, for all its modish scorn, soon appeared as benighted as the society he was satirising. Once heraldry had been freed from its toxic association with the hidebound French nobility, attitudes grew more even-handed. A bellwether was Voltaire’s nineteenthcentury compatriot Victor Hugo, who pronounced that ‘for him who can decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, a language’ , which could unlock the mysteries of the Middle Ages and shine a light on the gothic runes of Europe. In their attitude towards heraldry, the founders of the London Library were swayed less by Voltaire’s sarcasm than by Hugo’s dispassionate advocacy. Infused with the historic sensibility of Thomas Carlyle and the omniscient spirit of William Gladstone, the Library’s early committees invested heavily in heraldic tomes. There were, of course, the standard reference works. The first decade of the Library’s
existence coincided with an outpouring from the Burke publishing stable. Alongside well-established guides to the peerage and baronetage the Library acquired more ephemeral publications like Burke’s Heraldic Illustrations, comprising the armorial bearings of the principal families of the Empire (1845) and his General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (1878). The high-minded purposefulness of the early committees excluded Burke’s Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Females, including beauties of the Courts of George IV and William IV (1833), but the Library did procure his Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain, published in 1836–8, and the new edition of 1848–9, bearing the more flattering title The Landed Gentry. Alongside these staple texts, the Library purchased a range of comparable works from abroad, including the Almanach de Gotha (from 1830; issues going back to 1791 are in the safe) and the Annuaire de la noblesse de France et des maisons souveraines de l’Europe (1843). These were supplemented by a range of specialist studies, covering the origins and evolution of heraldry from the twelfth century onwards. The scale and diversity of the collection soon impinged on the Library’s classification system. Following the example of Elizabeth I’s chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, whose Great Hall at Theobalds, Hertfordshire, was adorned with the arms of England’s pre-eminent families arranged according to shire, the Library’s heraldic acquisitions
were originally incorporated into a larger section on the British counties. But over time the stock grew so sizeable that it warranted its own classmark, which it came to share with the genealogical collection. This shelving arrangement belies the quite separate origins of heraldry and genealogy. The parish registers and parched deeds that are haemoglobin to the genealogist are quite remote from the bloody battlefields and tournament grounds of medieval Europe, where coatarmour first came into existence. Although they later acquired a hereditary character, the armorial bearings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the marks of individual knights, daubed like war-paint on their shields as they rode into combat. Not for nothing did Mrs Bury Palliser compose a work on Historic Devices, Badges and War Cries (1870). Most evidence of heraldic practice from this period was lost in the mire of conflict, but the rolls of arms that heralds and chroniclers produced, recording the devices borne in particular engagements, furnish some impression. The originals are invariably in manuscript form, but two printed volumes, Rolls of Arms, Henry III (1967), and its sequel, Rolls of Arms, Edward I (1272–1307), published in 1997, provide detailed schedules of the oldest surviving English examples. While these editions lack the vital gold, vermilion and aquamarine of the original illuminations, two facsimiles of fifteenthand sixteenth-century rolls of arms offer a shimmering glimpse of this tradition. The
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE • 19
