Pomp and family circumstance
Peter Levi
HOW LORD BIRKENHEAD SAVED THE HERALDS by Anthony Wagner HMSO, f2.50 Sir Anthony Wagner, surely the most scholarly historian to have belonged to the College of Heralds in modern times, ruled that archaic body from 1961 to 1978 as Garter King of Arms. He pioneered the use of its unique records for the study of social mobility in English history, and he was the principal force behind its new museum in the Tower of London, and the recent beginnings of the systematic pub- lication of its documents. Because of the old-fashioned and almost private nature of the institution in which he served, his memoirs of its ups and downs are particu- larly valuable. He retired at 70, and five years later he went blind, but the careful meditation of theme that this imposes on him has produced a lucid though a short book, thought through from beginning to end. It is a heady brew of scholarly wisdom, family history, personal reminis- cence and the secret history of an institu- tion. I thought it a five-star good read.
The college is the only established in- stitution in Britain that has never been altered by parliament, so its growth and adventures represent an interesting special strand in history. I suppose it would be fair to say that Lord Chesterfield's harsh words about a herald, 'the silly fellow does not know his own silly business', may not have been unjust: against Sir Anthony Wagner both barrels would misfire. But the heralds have been under official attack three times in this century, always for much the same reasons. The first occasion was a Treasury committee of 1902 appointed by Balfour, some of whom wanted the heralds to be civil servants, as the Irish and Scottish heralds were; the second, referred to by heralds as the Cloud, was a Cabinet committee of 1927-8, the proceedings of which have only recently emerged from the dungeon of the Official Secrets Act, and the third Lord Teviot's foolish Bill of 1973, which was fortunately squashed in the House of Lords. 'I feel', said Lord Gage, `that we either have to work in with the College of Arms and with the Earl Mar- shal, or replace it and have a Bill for nationalising the whole of its work.'
The Cloud was much the most powerful of these attacks, and forms the nucleus of a fascinating essay. Its impetus came from Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a Home Secretary who disliked the degree of con- trol that the heralds exercised over hon- ours, coats of arms, and their transmission. He was a rigidly evangelical City of Lon- don solicitor, a baronet since 1919 but with no coat of arms until his peerage in 1929. He is said to have been at odds with Garter over a preposterous claim to belong to the Hicks family of Earl St Aldwyn, and in the end he did attain a grant of arms expressive of this unproved relationship, a grant of which Sir Anthony disapproves. I took the occasion to look up and he is certainly nauseating. He specialised in the new legal field of the motor-car, the telephone, and the aeroplane, he was a particularly blatant philanthropist, he defended the massacre at Amritsar, crushed the General Strike, and persecuted Russian spies. But Birken- head, who emerges as a sensible chairman of the Cloud committee, defeated him and he lost interest. His most searing minute against the college has been erased from the file, but the one written on 9 August 1927 is bad enough: 'Consider if we can smash the college ourselves by an Act of Parliament or whether a Royal Commis- sion is needed first. It can't go on much longer as a money-making scandal.'
The point about money is important. Not being paid by the state, the heralds made their small incomes by private prac- tice. These incomes have been inspected and they were modest. It was parliament that was the seat of corruption. The Home Office proposed to control the heralds and the government to pocket the supposed wealth. Sir Anthony makes the telling point that the Lyon Office in Scotland, which is nationalised, ran at a loss, but the College of Arms did not. Suspicions sur- vived this committee, but not for the first or last time in British history it was discovered that the existing system worked better than any alternative. The last grum- ble after all arguments had been argued was that the Earl Marshal ought to consult with the Master of the Rolls and consider academic acumen and qualification in appointments to the college. That was agreed in 1928, and the next vacancy for a new herald, which happened in 1931, went to Anthony Wagner. There were other candidates, and Machiavellian man- oeuvres, but Lord Hanworth, who was Master of the Rolls, supported him. 'For what it is worth Lady Hanworth, I learned later, had been an old friend of my cousin Henry.'
This enchanting man buried himself like a maggot in a cheese in library beyond library and in many unconsulted manu- scripts. He was fortunate in the slump of the Thirties, which meant that he was left largely undisturbed at his research for years. About 1934 he came on box after box of charters, rolls of arms, and records of the Court of Chivalry, more or less forgotten in the underground muniment room of the college. His personal passion was for genealogy, the usefulness of heraldry and its devices was something he learnt by experience. I remember him once saying that after lunch he used to play a game he invented called sideways genealo- gy, in which one sets out to connect any two given persons in England whomsoever by family relationship. If I remember rightly, he had never failed to do so within ten degrees of cousinage. If this is true it pleasantly disposes of the snob side of heraldry, and will comfort anyone who feels uneasy about their ancestors. At the same time heraldic pomp, as someone said in the debate on Lord Teviot's Bill, is part of the fun.
Grants of arms declined disastrously after 1688, and William III issued no Commissions of Visitation, which were the usual method of preventing unauthorised arms and which of course created impor- tant records as well as fees for the college. There was an attempt to regulate arms by the revived Court of Chivalry in the 1730s, and that Court has never been abolished, though between 1735 and 1955 it never met. It is a tantalising question what it did in 1955, but no doubt some Spectator reader will remember. In the 18th century the college suffered many years of financial low water. It cheered up under George IV, as you might expect, but Victorian snob- bery infected it, though it was run efficient- ly for years by the natural son of a natural son (so it seems) of the Duke of Norfolk. Alas, he lived on to be senile and the affairs of the college lapsed into chaos. The sale of honours under Lloyd George bene- fited certain heralds, but not the college. All the same the institution was strong enough, and strongly enough built into our establishment, to win hands down in 1902, and in 1928, and in 1973. This book is full of special flavours. It will appeal to con- noisseurs of English life and of personal style.
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