Some Augmentations of Honour awarded by Richard II and Henry VIII

Contributed by Brendon Clarke

Augmentations of Honour

Augmentations of honour are usually only added to existing armorial bearings. They are visual tributes paid by rulers to established armigers who have done something outstanding, or gained especial favour for some other reason.  By adding clear indications of distinction to them, augmentations of honour enhance armorials already previously awarded, or that have long been recognised as genuine.  They are patently actual honorifics as they are rare marks of conferred accolade, though they have no set format.  They usually manifest as additional charges awarded by Royal Warrant to recipients’ shields; or else their crests, badges or supporters.

The approximation of the arms of Scotland for the purposes of the honour was formed as a red demi-lion rampant pierced through the mouth with an arrow, bordered by a double tressure also in red; charged onto a small gold shield.  The king clearly specified this award as being for the earl’s merit – and also to his posterity, which meant that his descendants would be entitled to display it on their inherited bearings.  He also created the earl as Duke of Norfolk the following year, reinstating him to an entitlement forfeited long before by his father.  1513 was not a good year for “The Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France because King Henry himself had led a successful military expedition into France with battle and siege triumphs over the French around the same time as the Duke of Norfolk’s victory over the Scots at Flodden.

Differences

Edward the Confessor and Richard II

The first recorded augmentations of honour, as distinct from differences, are based on the attributed arms of King Edward, ‘The Confessor’ of the Saxon House of Wessex.  He lived before heraldry, as we recognise it, developed and is not known to have used armorials at all.  Two hundred years after his lifetime, however, thirteenth-century heralds attributed a set of ascribed bearings to all of the successive heads of the later House of Wessex, including ‘The Confessor’ who had been canonized by then.  He was assigned as having borne a blue shield charged with a gold cross surrounded by five doves, which were also gold. That the birds depicted on his ascribed armorials are doves has been disputed, and today most images show martlets.

Azure a cross fleury within an orle of ‘doves’ Or

When Richard II was sovereign in the latter part of the thirteen-hundreds, he augmented his own quartered bearings by impaling them with the arms ascribed to the Confessor whom he prized as the greatest saint.  King Richard placed the augmentation that he had conferred upon himself in the dexter of the impalement, giving the Saxon saint’s assigned armorials precedence over the ones he had inherited from his grandfather, King Edward III.  Despite his arms nowadays being typically shown in this way, he actually used his original, inherited, royal bearings for all but the last four of the twenty-two years he was sovereign and never included the ‘Confessor Augmentation’ onto his seal, although he may have intended to.

Richard II’s Great Seal, his Seal of Majesty used to validate documents of the utmost national importance – as the monarch’s Great Seal of the United Kingdom still does now,  remained displaying his original arms only.  But he granted, in addition to himself, augmentations to the bearings of a few chosen courtiers who met with his approval, and having married twice he also augmented the armorials of his wives.   They were “grace and favour” honours not necessarily earned by outstanding action – but accolades nonetheless.  Nearly all of the small number of nobles involved were told to add Saint Edward’s arms to their own as a dexter impalement, in the same way he had.  It is not the intention of this article to describe all of the augmentations of honour granted by Richard II or those awarded by Henry VIII, for there is insufficient space, but the deliberate enrichments awarded by Richard II are the first augmentations verified by records.  The handful of such awards claimed to have been granted by monarchs before his reign are traditions that lack documented proof.

Richard’s first queen consort, Anne of Bohemia died of plague in 1394 aged twenty-eight, when Richard was twenty-seven.  He espoused his second consort Isabella of Valois, a daughter of the King of France, when he was twenty-nine and she was six.  She included her dolls in her wedding trousseau.  With the augmentation Richard conferred onto them, both his wives’ shields became “tierced in pale” – i.e. three ways vertical.  The placement of the “Confessor Award” to the dexter emphasised its status. Richard’s wives displayed their husband’s royal arms, Quarterly France and England, in the middle tierce and placed their father’s, which they were entitled to use, in the sinister section.

King Richard’s bearings are seen to be still displaying ‘France Ancient,’ not ‘France Modern’ as his young wife, Isobella would have been taught to do.  The English monarchy did not change the number of fleurs-de-lys on their royal arms to match the French alteration made by Isobella’s grandfather in 1376 until some years after Richard II’s overthrow.

Henry VIII

Waxwork of Henry VIII previously exhibited at Fort Paull, a gun battery he built on the banks of the Humber in East Yorkshire.

A hundred and fifty years later, towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, one of Mowbray’s descendants, the Earl of Surrey,  took it upon himself to include the Confessor augmentation as one of the quarters displayed on his very showy coat of arms.  The earl claimed this privilege because his ancestor had been granted the accolade previous to being exiled from the country, although there does not seem to be any record revealing that the award was inheritable.

Henry VIII was by then about fifty-seven and so not of a great age, but he was tormented by illness and sores.  Viewing the Earl of Surrey’s adoption of the augmentation through increasingly wrathful eyes, the afflicted king considered the noble’s use of the accolade without royal permission to have been an infamous and clear indication that Surrey was wishing him harm, and plotting to take the throne for himself.  Henry therefore had the earl beheaded for high treason.  In addition he also decided to execute the Earl of Surrey’s father whom he had also incarcerated; but he died himself, the night before this sentence was to be carried out.  The execution was cancelled.  The peer whose life was thereby spared was the Third Duke of Norfolk, a son of the Duke of Norfolk to whom King Henry had awarded the Flodden Augmentation, thirty-four years beforehand.  As the king’s own warrant had granted the Flodden honour to the duke’s father’s “posterity” the image of the Scottish red lion pierced through the mouth by an arrow could be exhibited on his own bearings.  This he continued to do, subsequent to being let out from jail.  His descendant, the present Duke of Norfolk and overseer of the College of Arms in London still displays the image of the mortally wounded lion on his splendid, hereditary coat.

Awards conferred by Richard II certainly did not guarantee lasting favour, but augmentations awarded by Henry VIII did not always bring enduring good fortune either, or even lasting life.  The Marquis of Exeter, Sir Henry Courteney, for instance, Knight of the Garter, and the sovereign’s cousin, was raised to high and honourable estate, mostly by virtue of having been a friend of the second Tudor king since they were children.  As adults Henry augmented Sir Henry Courteney’s armorials by permitting him to use the royal arms, so underlining visually his linkage with the royal family.  They were differenced by a bordure and placed as the first of the marquis’s quarterly bearings.  Courteney’s eventual fate years later was to be accused, without much evidence, of plotting to supplant Henry on the throne.  He was decapitated by a sword on Tower Hill, outside the Tower of London.

Manners

The shields opposite show the Manners’ arms before and after the augmentation. The latter is in the church of All Saints in Bakewell in Derbyshire.  The crescent charge for cadency-difference indicates that this is the shield of a second son.

The principal seat of the Manners family became Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. According to tradition, Sir Thomas’s second son, John Manners tried to court Dorothy Vernon who lived at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. As the Vernons were Catholics, her father forbade the pair from associating. The anecdote maintains that the young couple eloped to Leicester and married, inspiring the writing of romantic novels about them, plus an opera.  It seems Dorothy Vernon’s father eventually relented because he left Haddon Hall and much of his landed estate to her.  The stately home that the Vernons had lived in for four centuries thus came into the ownership of the Manners family.  The cadency mark indicating a second son on the Manners shield at Bakewell Church refers to John.

The Rutland Arms in Bakewell

RETURN

The large signboard above the main entrance is based on the heraldic achievements of the Dukes of Rutland.  It displays the Manners shield bounded by the symbol of the Order of The Garter, referencing the twelve peers of the dynasty who have been invested into that celebrated institution – eight before the hotel was built and another four afterwards.  The horns, hooves, manes and tufts of the shield’s unicorn supporters are golden.  Rising from a “duke’s coronet” also gold is a ‘Cap of Authority’ – a chapeau gules turned up ermine.  Such armorial headgear supplanting the helmet of rank is rare, though slightly more common amongst Scottish armory.  The cap is surmounted by the dynasty’s crest: ‘A Peacock in its Pride’ whilst the motto inscribed onto the ribbon below the escutcheon, “Pour y parvenir” translates as either, “In order to obtain it” or perhaps, “So as to accomplish it.” Whichever translation is preferred, no one seems quite sure what it means. It is described as an “enigmatic” motto and is one of the inscrutabilities of grouse-shooting lords….