Alex Maxwell Findlater;44815 wrote:
Lyon is enjoined by the 1672 Act to grant arms to those who are "virtuous and well-deserving". This has always been taken as his authority to grant arms and thus confirm that someone is a gentleman, alias untitled noble.
I read the 1672 act as taking for granted that anyone who was a gentleman already had arms (probably originally assumed, not granted). The first operative section of the act empowers Lyon to visit and matriculate the arms of nobles, barons, and gentlemen (note: three different categories of people) as part of an effort to regulate and systematize what an absolutist monarchy (we’re talking the Stuart Restoration here) considered heraldic chaos. Only then does it say that Lyon may grant arms to others who are virtuous and well-deserving. I see nothing in the act that would equate V&WD with untitled noble or gentleman. If the Scots Parliament had meant that Lyon could confirm gentle status by granting arms, it would presumably have said so.
Quote:
I understood that Lord Lyon Learney was the first to use the noblesse clause, but I haven’t checked that. That would date it to say 1945 or so. The story which I heard was that a young lady of foreign birth wanted to marry a Scotsman who was armigerous. Her family would not allow it because they believed that his arms were not of the status of theirs. Learney was so affected by this sad situation that forthwith he inserted a noblesse clause in the LPs.
Heart-wrenching, but basically in the same category as the recent case in which a Massachusetts man bought the alleged French title of Comte de Longueville, supposedly to impress a communist village official in China who had once been nasty to his wife. The desire to vindicate the lady before her commie tormentor was presented by those involved in the transaction as justifying the "sale" of this "title," which is totally illegal under French law. The Court of Session expressed skepticism about Learney’s equation of armigerous with noble in the Maclean of Ardgour vs. Maclean case in the 1940s, although it did not direct Lyon to cease the inclusion of the nobility/noblesse clause.
Quote:
Grants in England from the C16 and C17 sometimes do include a noblesse clause or equivalent, but I really cannot quote one off then top of my head, it’s not something which interests me particularly. Perhaps someone else might have some evidence of this.
Working from memory of having read some of these and discussing them (I think) in the HSS forum, the language of these grants typically says that the recipient has shown himself by his deeds to be noble, and that the arms are granted as a token of that nobility, not that the recipient is made noble by virtue of the grant of arms.
Alex Maxwell Findlater;44815 wrote:
Very few patents of arms survive in Scotland from before the C19. The first volume of the Register does not copy out the actual words of the patent. The second volume started in 1803/4, but I have to admit that I have only looked at the first volume, for historical purposes, and later volumes which have entries which interest me for other reasons. So when grants first were recorded in their entirety I am not sure.
Francois Velde has the texts of three Scottish patents (two personal and one corporate) from 1567, 1674, and 1859 at http://www.heraldica.org/topics/britain/lyondocs.htm#Patents. None of them have anything remotely resembling a noblesse clause. The first follows the blazon with the statement "quhilk he and his posteritie may lefullie beir without reproche (which he and his posterity may lawfully bear without reproach)." The corresponding phrase in the second (a matriculation to the Royal Burgh of Aberdeen) is "Which Arms above-blazoned, I hereby declare to have been, and to be, the true and unrepealable Signs Armorial of the Burgh Royal above-named." There is no corresponding closing in the third; the blazon is prefaced with "Know ye therefore that We have devised and do by these presents Assign, Ratify, and Confirm unto the said Sir James Campbell, Knight, and his Descendants, to bear and use in all time coming, with due and proper differences, according to the Laws of Arms, the following Ensigns-Armorial…," with nothing following the blazon other than the standard testimonium (in witness whereof, etc.).