Artificial arms
BY DAVID GELBER
Nigel Ramsay, editor
HERALDS AND HERALDRY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND
On January 13, 1547, as Henry VIII lay close to death, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was brought to the Guildhall and arraigned for treason. His offence: the misappropriation of the arms of Edward the Confessor, with the intent of disrupting the succession and depriving the King’s son and lawful heir of the throne. It mattered little that the arms the nobleman stood accused of usurping were a fifteenth-century fabrication (it was only a hundred years after the sainted King’s death that the first examples of heraldry appeared). The discovery in the earl’s house at Kenninghall of escutcheons of the Confessor’s apocryphal arms provided the cabal led by Thomas and Edward Seymour, uncles to the future Edward VI, with the evidence it needed to eliminate a putative enemy. Surrey himself conspired in the fiction that fixed his doom. Far from protesting that the arms were merely a chronicler’s invention, he insisted on his family’s immortal right to them by gift of King Edward himself. These arguments made little impression. A common jury, swayed by the insistence of – among others – Edward Barker, Garter King of Arms, that Surrey had no claim to the arms in question, found him guilty of treason. Six days later he was beheaded.
Surrey’s execution is only the most graphic reminder of the central place that the much-denigrated pursuit of heraldry occupied in sixteenth-century life. It was, at the most elevated level, a symbol of royal authority and the imperishable nature of monarchy. Writing in 1585, the Anglican theologian Thomas Bilson observed that princes could demand from their subjects “a sober reverence . . . to their ensigns, arms and recognisances, such as they shall use or allow to represent their power”. But heraldry was also a staple of everyday life – almost ubiquitous on coins, seals and charters, while also a common adornment of porches, chimneypieces and firebacks, tombs and monuments, and such domestic furnishings as plate, tableware and napery.
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Surrey’s execution is only the most graphic reminder of the central place that the much-denigrated pursuit of heraldry occupied in sixteenth-century life. It was, at the most elevated level, a symbol of royal authority and the imperishable nature of monarchy. Writing in 1585, the Anglican theologian Thomas Bilson observed that princes could demand from their subjects “a sober reverence . . . to their ensigns, arms and recognisances, such as they shall use or allow to represent their power”. But heraldry was also a staple of everyday life – almost ubiquitous on coins, seals and charters, while also a common adornment of porches, chimneypieces and firebacks, tombs and monuments, and such domestic furnishings as plate, tableware and napery.
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