A REFORMING GENEALOGIST. •
Ma. ROUND is nothing if not a fighter. He descends into the lists to do battle with all and sundry, from the College of Arms and its defenders to the humbler pretender to famous descent. As a representative of the newer school of genealo- gists, who to an antiquary's industry add something of a lawyer's acumen, a passion for facts, and much general historical learning, he devotes - himself to the exposure of frauds and the overthrow of pretentious claims in heraldry,. professional and amateur. At the same time he goes about his iconoclasm in a temper of commendable moderation. He has none of the inverted snobbishness which has distinguished certain recent books on the same subject, and his common attitude towards abuses is one of urbane contempt. The great learning of the author of Feudal England does not need to be insisted upon, but Mr. Round wears his know- ledge lightly, and has a very pretty humour of his own. The result is a book which, though highly technical, may be read by the layman with amusement and profit. Burke's Peerage is the chief object of his attack, but his most important point is made against the doctrine of " X " and Mr. Fox- Davies that the right to bear arms is dependent upon their matriculation in the College of Arms. The numerous fallacies of this view are skilfully expounded, and we must confess that Mr. Round's arguments seem to us final. He shows that the oldest and purest right to arms was that conferred by user. He points out that the Heralds' College has been in the past the chief fountain of corrupt heraldry and fictitious pedigrees, and that in our own day a grant of arms is no matter of special privilege, as some would have us believe, but of a mere payment of cash. He combats the assertion that the College has the sole authority and control of armorial matters, by quoting from Mr. Pixley's History of the Baronetage the famous decision of the law officers of the Crown in 1625, that an appeal lay in this matter from the Court of Chivalry to the Court of Chancery. By all means let arms be matricu- lated, but there is small temptation for the country gentle- man whose family have borne arms for five hundred years to pay 276 10s. for the privilege of being enrolled, along with a crowd of ambitious nouveaux riches, who probably are assum- ing the coat of some house with which they have no connection.
The methods of the old herald were simple in the extreme. Whenever he found a daughter of a great family unclaimed he set her aside, and used her as a branch in some one of the family trees he had to manufacture. To those who believe that genealogical science may be a valuable handmaid to history this state of affairs is grievous in the extreme. In his paper on the " Peerage " Mr. Round devotes himself to demolishing bogus claims and correcting faulty ones. He begins by showing that Freeman's diatribe against the House of Lords for laying down the rule that the King's writ "ennobled the blood" is entirely beside the point, the said doc- trine having been a creation of the English Judges. From this the author proceeds to quote instances of titles which are in use, but not satisfactorily proved, such as the Irish " Valentia" and the Scottish "Belhaven." The cause of this is the absence of any valid check on the assumption of Scottish and Irish titles. Thence he turns his attention to false or unproved genealogies. Powers who become De la Poor, Morres whose transition to De Montmorency was the object of one of Freeman's most trenchant attacks, the Robinsons who having obtained the old Lytton properties by bequest straightway annexed the pedigree of the old Lyttons of Knebworth ; and best of all, the banking family of Smith, who, originating in a respectable draper of Nottingham, were raised to the Peer- age by Pitt, and,' having adopted Carrington as their title, soon took it as their surname also and straightway derived their descent from a crusading St. Michael of that ilk. Mr. Round gives a long list of purchased baronies, the prices ranging from 210,000 upwards, and attacks strongly the "habit, common in the palmy days of Lord Melbourne, of calling out of abeyance certain ancient baronies in favour of modern co-heirs but distantly connected with them." But
• for long descent, certified- and indubitable,- he has all the•
• enthusiasm of the true genealogist. The Ferrers of Baddesley
• -Clinton, for example, descend straight from the great house of Ferrers, "which was already -mighty when the Conqueror
• Studies in Peerage and Fatally History. By 3. Horace Bound. London; A. Constable and Co. [lb. 6d. net.]
filled the throne, and had attained to an earldom in the early
days of Stephen. The existence of such a line, outside the House of Lords, serves to remind us that, in England, a simple country gentleman can still look down in calm disdain, from the heights of immemorial noblesse, on the scramble for the newest of peerage dignities, orfor those baronet- cies which are fast becoming the peculiar perquisite, of the nouveau riche." The Stuart Kings, he thinks, had their faults, but they also had their merits, for they disfranchised brewers while we ennoble them. A few pedigrees, only a very few, such as that of Berkeley and Wrottesley, are admitted to be above criticism. Even the pride of the Vavasour and the Kingsale descent is shown to be baseless. One highly inter- esting point is made in connection with the famous Howard augmentation, given after Flodden, which is used to-day by the Carlisle and Norfolk families, and by many others. Mr. Round alleges that it was granted in fee simple, and would therefore, he declares, descend to heirs-general, in which case the Lords Mowbray and Petxe are now alone entitled to it.
In an admirable paper on the "Origin of the Stewarts " he demolishes the fantastic speculations of a certain Mr. Hewison. "A dreadful vision of dog-totems, arrayed in the Stewart tartan, and feasting, with fiery visage, on pancakes in the streets of Dol, warns one to leave this world of wonders." He shows reason to believe that the first of the name, Alan, the son of Flaald, was not a Norman, but a Breton, which is an interesting fact in the light of their subsequent Celtic con- nection. From this he passes on to upset the pretensions of the Norfolk Stiwards to claim kin with the Scottish house, and very effectively he performs his work. The paper on "Our English Hapsburgs" begins in a style of dignified persiflage, but before it concludes the imperial descent of the Feildings vanishes into thin air. It is sad work for the reader to part with these cherished illusions, but Mr. Round's merciless industry leaves him no alternative. Sometimes the fault lay with the Heralds' College, which granted arms implying relationship where there was none, as in the recent cases of the Wicklows and the late Lord Russell of Killowen, who received respectively the Norfolk and the Bedford coats almost without a difference. Sometimes the arms speak truly, while it is the herald and the family historian who have invented pedigrees. A case in point is that of the Bedford Russells, who in the famous lion rampant carry a perfectly distinct cognisance. But the pedigree-maker first of all derived them from the Russells of Kingston- Russell in Dorsetshire, with whom Mr. Round assures us that they had no sort of connection, and then by way of giving them Norman ancestry, carried up the Kingston-Russell house to a Norman, Hugh du Rozel, in a perfectly impossible pedigree. Mr. Round, who gives the real pedigree, traces it to a certain Henry Russell, who was returned to Parliament for Weymouth under Henry VI., an appropriate descent for the great Whig family. Of the other studies, those on the succession to the Crown and on Lord Glamorgan's dukedom are as valuable to the historian as to the genealogist, and that on the barony of Mowbray is an interesting contribution to Peerage law. Mr. Round has gathered into this volume a great mass of curious learning, and he has given us many examples of how deft and skilful and well-mannered an iconoclast can be.
We must add, however, that the assertions made in regard to alleged false pedigrees and spurious peerages are not ours, but Mr. Round's. He is responsible for them, and not we, and we cannot open our correspondence columns to any letters on the subject. Great are the controversial powers of the grammarian and the theologian, but they pale before those of the fighting genealogist and antiquarian. We frankly admit that we shrink with horror from the very thought of a literary tournament of heralds. If "Rouge Dragon" wants to swallow Mr. Round alive, it must be somewhere else than in the pages of the Spectator.
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