HERALDRY GENEALOGY & 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.

The 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 fifteenthp and sixteenth-century rolls of arms offer a shimmering glimpse of this tradition. The earliest, the Roxburghe Club’s Medieval Pageant: Writhe’s Garter Book, edited by Sir Anthony Wagner (1993), is a reproduction of the mid-fifteenth-century Salisbury Roll. It depicts the male-line Montagu ancestors of Robert Neville, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, in full-length portraits, wearing tabards of their arms. Their wives also appear, connected to their husbands by cords or even chains.

The second, Fac Simile of an Ancient Heraldic Manuscript emblazoned by Sir David Lyndsay, edited by D. Laing, is an 1878 edition of a Scottish roll of arms from the 1540s. It includes, conventionally enough, the shields of the House of Stuart and the nobility of Scotland. But mingled with them are the arms – entirely fictitious – of the ‘kings of the orient’ , including Balthasar, King of Saba, and Melchior, King of Araby, as well as biblical figures like David and Joshua, the latter imaginatively styled ‘duke of the people of Israel’.

By the sixteenth century, fantasies of this sort were almost de rigueur in heraldic works. This was a period when feudal structures were in mortal decay and social mobility was rising. Coats of arms – previously restricted to the fighting estate – were now adopted by merchants, lawyers and other unheroic types as status symbols. In response, Henry VIII instituted a series of heraldic visitations to ensure that only ‘men of good honest reputation’ , ‘not issued of vile blood’ , acquired armorial achievements. The records compiled during these visitations form one of the most valuable sources for the arms of the English gentry between 1530 and 1688 – transcripts can be found in the Library’s Harleian Society collection.

The assumption of heraldic devices by a more literate class of people engendered a voracious appetite for armorial knowledge. Taking advantage of the printing revolution of the later fifteenth century, armorialists produced a range of heraldic primers for these newly risen men, who were indifferent to chivalric norms. They sought to give a more virtuous and sanitary gloss to heraldic history, consistent with the Christian humanist values their readers purported to incarnate. But in their efforts to satisfy their vanity, they offered little distinction between myth and reality.

Frontispiece from Thomas Milles’s Catalogue of Honor (1610).

One of the earliest printed texts in England, the Boke of St Albans (first published in 1486, and owned by the Library in facsimile), was a threepart manual of essential aristocratic accomplishments: hunting, hawking and heraldry. The last, it alleged, was invented at the Siege of Troy, while the law of arms was ‘begun before any law in the world but the law of nature, and before the Ten Commandments’ . Christ ‘was a gentleman of his mother’s behalf and bore coatarmour of ancestors’ .

The Boke of St Albans set the pattern for heraldic treatises of the next two centuries, in which the Library’s collections are particularly rich. John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie (1586), a dialogue between a herald, knight, cleric, lawyer, ploughman and antiquary, describes how Christ was a ‘gentleman of blood’ on account of his descent from Noah’s son Shem, while Gerard Legh’s Accedence of Armorie (which went through six editions between 1562 and 1612, the fifth of which the Library owns) referred to ‘the genealogy of Matthew and Luke’ as proof of his ‘great lineage’ .

Biblical heraldry was only the start. Favine’s Theater of Honour (1623) gave arms to the ancient Persians and Egyptians, Gerard Legh ascribed them to classical figures, like Hector and Alexander the Great, while John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldry (the Library possesses the third edition of 1638) included Caesar and Aeneas’s grandson Brutus in his gallery of heraldic worthies. Thomas Milles in his Catalogue of Honor (1610) was restrained by comparison, assigning arms only as far back as Egbert, the ninth-century King of Wessex.

In the ruthless world of heraldic publishing, other conceits could push sales. The Mirrour of Maiestie by ‘H.G.’ (1618) offered illustrations of the arms of Jacobean notables ‘poetically unfolded’ , while the herald Ralph Brooke made accuracy the hallmark of his Catalogue of and Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, and Viscounts of this Realm of England (1619), attacking the ‘upstarts and mountebanks’ who had intruded on his professional expertise. As two Italian works owned by the Library, Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorese (1574) and Filiberto Campanile’s L’armi dé nobili (1610) illustrate, this ravening for heraldic knowledge was not merely an English insatiability.

Alongside displays of arms, real and imaginary, many heraldic works offered the newly minted gentleman advice on designing his shield. A kind of temporal astrology evolved, in which moral qualities were attributed to tinctures, and planets, elements, seasons and precious stones were associated with heraldic charges. For Ferne, azure and gules (the colour red) symbolised justice and charity respectively, while Guillim thought vert a ‘colour most wholesome and pleasant to the eye, except it be in a young gentlewoman’s face’ .

It was this delight in esoteric symbolism that did so much to discredit Renaissance heraldic writers. The Royalist Matthew Carter attacked the ‘fantastic humour’ of these modern pagans in his Honor Redivivus or an Analysis of honor and armory (1660), written for consolation from his Parliamentarian prison cell. However, a new edition of Guillim appeared as late as 1724. With good cause might the protagonist of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) protest: ‘With shame I confess it, my dear Miss Vernon, the mysteries couched under the grim hieroglyphics of heraldry are to me as unintelligible as those of the pyramids of Egypt. ’ It was perhaps to alleviate such befuddlement that the Library acquired titles like Intelligible Heraldry by Christopher and Adrian Lynch- Robinson (1948), Iain Moncrieffe and Don Pottinger’s Simple Heraldry (1953) and G. Harvey Johnston’s Scottish Heraldry Made Easy (1904).

The effort to explode heraldic mythologies and reclaim the subject for the Age of Reason began in earnest in the late eighteenth century. In his Complete Body of Heraldry (1780), Joseph Edmondson bemoaned the ‘ridicule and contempt’ with which the study of arms was now treated, while James Dallaway – perhaps more in hope than expectation – declared in his Inquiries into the origin and progress of the Science of Heraldry in England (1793) that ‘heraldry in its present state has just pretensions to be ranked in the circle of sciences, so general [is] its usage, so infinitely various … its discriminations, and so classical … its specific differences’ .

Example of coats of arms from Matthew Carter’s Honor Redivivus (1660).

This evidence-based approach set a pattern for later heraldic research. Twentieth-century studies such as Anthony Wagner’s Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages (1956), Maurice Keen’s Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England (2002) and C.W. Scott-Giles’s Shakespeare’s Heraldry (1950) revealed the proper place of heraldry in the politics, society and literature of earlier times.

Beyond these weighty monographs, the Library’s collection also exposes the brazen diversity of heraldry. Titles such as Geoffrey Briggs’s Civic and Corporate Heraldry (1971), Alfred Edwin Weightman’s Heraldry in the Royal Navy (1957), and Dow’s Railway Heraldry (1973) disclose how far the use of arms spread beyond their chivalric origins. Other works illustrate their global reach. These range from Siebmacher’s Wappenbuch (from 1854), an encyclopaedic compendium of German heraldry, to more whimsical volumes like Cornelius Pama’s Lions and Virgins: Heraldic state symbols … in South Africa (1965) and the sumptuous Armorial of Haiti, edited by Clive Cheesman (2007), depicting the outlandish arms invented for the Duc de Marmelade, the Comte de Limonade and the rest of King Henry Christophe’s court.

Notwithstanding the scientific pretension of some armorialists, heraldry remains an intensely visual art. Books on Chinese Armorial Porcelain (David Sanctuary Howard, 2 vols., 1974–2003), Heraldic Watermarks (Francisco de Asis de Bofarull y Sans, 1956), Stained and Painted Heraldic Glass (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, 1962) and Armorial Book- Plates (P. Neville Barnett, 1932) spotlight its numerous applications, while W.H. St John Hope’s Heraldry for Craftsmen and Designers (1936) offers practical advice for the artist. Other works explore particular species of heraldic imagery, most imaginatively H. Stanford London’s Royal Beasts (1956) and Thomas Moule’s Heraldry of Fish (1842).

But for all the gaiety of lions rampant and dragons passant, Henry Lawrance’s Heraldry from Military Monuments before 1350 (1946) chronicles the most consistent use of armorial imagery from earliest times, recalling Thomas Gray’s admonition in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751):

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Frontispiece from John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldry (1611).